Mehdi Abbasi; gholam hossein karimi koostan
Abstract
The causative alternation is a transitivity alternation between a causative verb and its anti-causative counterpart. Concerning the relationship between the two variants, two general ...
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The causative alternation is a transitivity alternation between a causative verb and its anti-causative counterpart. Concerning the relationship between the two variants, two general approaches have been taken by linguists: derivational and non-derivational. In the derivational approach, it is supposed that one of the variants is basic and the other one derived. In the intransitive base approach (causativisation), the anti-causative is considered basic and the causative derived. In the transitive base approach (anti-causativisation), however, the causative is considered basic and the anti-causative derived. In the non-derivational or common base approach there is no direct relationship between the two variants but both come from a third source or root. The aim of this article is to critically evaluate the above-mentioned approaches in the light of morphologically marked alternating verbs in the Khūri dialect __ a Northwest Iranian language spoken in the Central Desert of Iran. The morphological evidence in Khūri shows that the derivational approaches to the causative alternation do not have a general analytic strategy and can only account for the morphological marking of the causative or anti-causative variant. On the contrary, the non-derivational common base approach covers the areas of variation in Khūri (one of the two variants or both of them could be marked) and can explain this morphological variation inclusively.
