User:Becksreed/sandbox

In linguistics, causative alternation is the phenomenon in which a verb has both a transitive (specifically causative) and an intransitive meaning. A causatively alternating verb, such as "open", has both a transitive meaning ("I opened the door") and an intransitive meaning ("The door opened"). Since in the transitive use of the verb, the subject is causing the action denoted by the intransitive version, the transitive version is called "causative". The intransitive variant describes a situation in which the theme participant (in this case "the door") undergoes a change of state, becoming, for example, "opened," and this type of meaning is called inchoative.

With regard to language acquisition in children, not all intransitive verbs alternate in the same way. When learning English, children sometimes mistakenly extend the causative alternation to verbs that alternate in other ways, producing sentences like "I come it closer so it won't fall" instead of "I made it come closer or I moved it closer." Once children establish that a particular transitivity alternation is productive, they may extend the alternation to new verbs. Such extension are unacceptable for English verbs like come, as in the sentence "Come it over here." Three possible sources for children's errors are: they could be applying a lexical semantic rule too broadly, failing to notice semantic constraints that restrict the lexical rule; they may be retrieving the wrong verb under pressure of the discourse; or children may not have acquired an adult semantic representation for some verbs and thus misuse these verbs. Pinker assumes that children may stop producing causative errors when they learn the meaning of each verb, when they are better at retrieving verbs, and when they learn the correct restrictions on the causative alternation.