Talk:Causative alternation

Orphan
I happened to find this page by chance. It's very well-written, but there are very few links that come to this page. I've added the WikiProjectLinguistics tag on this page so that hopefully more readership will be able to find it and link other pages to it.Joeystanley (talk) 14:26, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Who are the authors of this page?
I'm interested in the history of this page. It started as a stub by User:Erutuon in 2011. Then, out of nowhere, four users (User:Milena.Vaz, User:Eliachow, User:Becksreed, and User:Natalielo93) started contributing a massive amount to the page in two months (Oct to Dec 2013). All four apparently created the accounts soon before these edits, deleted them soon after, and made virtually no edits besides the ones on this page. Does anyone know why these four users came, contributed so much, and left? Was it part of a semester project or something? (The timing does seem to fit.) I'd like to add to the page and tie it in with the page on Causatives, but I would like to communicate with them first. Joeystanley (talk) 17:15, 24 April 2014 (UTC)
 * They are UBC students working on this topic as a linguistic course project last year!--Lingfan (talk) 16:30, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Grammaticality of the french example
I have no idea what Sabo was smoking, but the sentence is 110% grammatical without the reflexive pronoun, it just becomes a regular full-on passive or adjectival construction instead: "the bottles are broken [by someone/something]". I've shifted the sentence to a tense that does not have auxiliaries to correct that. Circéus (talk) 01:35, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

Can a native English speaker help out here...
Chapter: Child Language Acquisition - last 2 sentences...

• It has been suggested that children learn this is through the no negative evidence problem;

‘that children learn this is...’ ???

• for example a child will learn that the verb ‘throw’ can never be used in a subject position: *”the ball threw”.[17]

How can a verb be in a subject position? What’s the grammatical idea behind this? ‘threw’ being intransitive only? Inanimate subject?

Next Paragraph header starts with ‘In children with specific language impairments’

‘In children...’ -> Doesn’t make any sense to me! Mramosch (talk) 18:04, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

How are these verbs distinct from ergative / labile verbs?
How are these verbs distinct from ergative verbs? I'm having trouble telling them apart. It seems that at a minimum the concepts are close enough that they could link to each other. Note they are both in Category:Transitivity and valency. – M.boli (talk) 21:06, 23 December 2020 (UTC)


 * NB the following


 * "We say that verbs are ‘labile’ when they allow the ‘causative verb alternation’, which can be illustrated by heal in the following clauses: he doctor healed their wounds and Their wounds healed." (p. 5)


 * "The ergative alternation is also referred to as causative alternation (Haspelmath 1993, Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995), transitivity alternation (Hale and Keyser 1987), and unaccusativity alternation (Kiparsky 1998), among others." (p. 2fn)


 * Based on those, causative alternation is what makes labile (ergative) verbs labile. —  AjaxSmack 23:30, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Merge proposal
Causative alternation and labile verb seem to refer to the same thing. Should they be merged? —  AjaxSmack 23:30, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Support. These two articles discuss the same thing. "Labile verbs" should be the merge target, since "Causative alternation" often has a wider scope of meaning that also includes causative derivations with overt morphological marking, whereas the content of this article only covers verbs that don't have any causative marker when used transitively (= labile verbs). –Austronesier (talk) 21:52, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
 * While looking to close this discussion, I'm a little confused by your comment. By "Labile verbs" should be the merge target, do you mean that Labile verb should be merged to Causative alternation (the latter being broader), or do you mean that the target (in the sense of "target=" within a merge template) should be Labile verb. Klbrain (talk) 10:23, 15 July 2023 (UTC)
 * What I meant was: merge the content (except for the generative cruft, which was added by students as a linguistic course project and which is undue in such exessive detail) of "Causative alternation" into "Labile verbs", since the former as defined in this article is just a fork of the latter. I haven't really thought about the redirect target of causative alternation after the merge. I indicated that "Causative alternation" can have a broader meaning than expounded here, but I think I was mistaken then. –Austronesier (talk) 11:13, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
 * note that I've done a full-content merge, including the material from someone's linguistics thesis ... making desicions of what to cull and what to keep in this field is beyond my skill, so I won't be offended if there is refinement in situ. Klbrain (talk) 15:35, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
 * note that I've done a full-content merge, including the material from someone's linguistics thesis ... making desicions of what to cull and what to keep in this field is beyond my skill, so I won't be offended if there is refinement in situ. Klbrain (talk) 15:35, 21 August 2023 (UTC)