the assume position and the causative senses of posture verbs. As mentioned in chapter 1, Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995) identify three possible non-causative meanings for verbs of spatial configuration, referred to as posture verbs in this dissertation: a simple position meaning, a maintain position meaning, and an assume position meaning. The center of attention in this chapter is the causative and assume position senses of these verbs, both of which will be claimed to possess causative semantics and syntax. By means of the examination of the argument structures of these two causative senses, the properties of the simple position and the maintain position senses will be initially ascertained; nevertheless, their peculiarities will be further analyzed in chapter 3.
On a first approach to the matter at hand, I present the following data about the posture verb sit in some Romance and Germanic languages (1-6) to establish an initial comparison of the mechanisms to express causation and path encoding between them. Regarding causation, I would like to call attention to the importance of the observable variation in the examples below, inasmuch as two different mechanisms are in use, namely, the so-called anticausative alternation and the labile alternation. The causative and assume position senses of posture verbs show a striking similarity across Romance languages –Spanish, Catalan, French (1-3)– and Germanic languages – Swedish, German (5-6)–, except for English (4), which does not use an anticausativizing strategy to create the assume position sense (1b-6b), but rather it uses the intransitive verb sit to build all senses, including the simple position sense. I put forward that what sets apart English from the rest of languages is its labile nature, namely, English uses the same verb root for causative and anticausative structures with no further difference
between them. On the other hand, the rest of Germanic languages, and the Romance languages as well, follow the anticausative pattern creating their respective assume position sense by means of a reflexive pronoun.
(1) a. Yo senté al niño en la silla (Spanish) I sat to-the child on the chair
b. El niño se sentó en la silla The child REF sat-down on the chair
(2) a. El pare va asseure el nen a la cadira (Catalan) The father PST sit the child on the chair
‘The father sat the child on the chair’
b. El nen es va asseure a la cadira The child REF PST sit-down on the chair ‘The child sat down on the chair’
(Jaume Mateu, p.c.)
(3) a. J’assieds l’enfant sur une chaise pour le faire manger (French) I sit the-child on a chair for him make eat
‘I sit the child on a chair to feed him’
b. Je m’est assis dans le fouteil I REF-is sat-down in the sofa ‘I sat down on the sofa’
(4) a. I sat the child on the chair (English)
b. The child sat down on the chair
(5) a. Peter satte babyn i stolen (Swedish)
‘Peter sat the baby in the chair’
b. Peter satte sig upp i sängen ‘Peter sat down’
(Viberg 2013:141)
(6) a. Der Vater setzte das Kind auf den Stuhl (German) The father sat the child on the chair
‘The father sat the child on the chair’
b. Das Kind setzte sich auf den Stuhl The child sat-down REF on the chair ‘The child sat down on the chair’
The argument structure configurations underlying these verbs will reflect these properties and will be labeled causative and autocausative. Concentrating now on English and Spanish, I will argue that the examples in (1) have the same number of participants, that is, initiator, undergoer, and resultee, as well as subevents, differing in that the variant with the clitic se (1b) confers a semantic nuance not included in (1a), which I will refer to with the label autocausation, following Geniušienė (1987). The reason behind this nomenclature is self-explanatory: the subject’s action is the cause of the motion affecting the subject itself. The clitic will be argued to play a placeholder function in the argument structure, that is, its presence will serve to mark that the element that works as undergoer and resultee is also the initiator of the event. This will be shown to be in consonance with the fact that Spanish, as other Romance languages, is an anticausative language, which has been traditionally regarded as a way of deleting or demoting one of the participants of the event. However, instead of adopting this view, I will assume with Pujalte & Saab (2012) that the clitic is inserted to satisfy the requirement of initP to have an argument that works as an initiator. By contrast, the lexical entry argued for the equivalent sequences in English (4) will be notably simpler.
The reason behind it is the fact that English is a language that enters the labile alternation. As discussed in Ramchand (2008:82-89), the causative variant of this verb will require the merging of an initP to allow the insertion of an initiating subevent, whose specifier will appear in evtP. It will need to account for the fact that the English posture verb sit denotes a process, whose only participant is exclusively the undergoer of the event.
The second factor determining the properties of posture verbs in English will be its satellite-framedness, which allows it to introduce a result path, an element morphophonologically independent from the verb, in the event. Since Spanish is a verb-framed language, the lexical entry for Spanish sentar ‘sit’ will specify that this verb
contains the category labels init, proc, and res in its first phase syntax, thus, codifying the path information in the verb root. As put forward in Mateu (2002) and Acedo Matellán (2010), the acquisition of a property can be conceived of as a path. In the lexical entry, the result will identify the path, which in this case can be identified with the property of being seated. In contrast, English will unavoidably require a satellite such as down (4b) to specify the result of the event.
In the following sections, I present evidence that supports the claims laid out above. First, in section 2, I will argue that cross-linguistic variation in the encoding of causation is pertinent for posture verbs inasmuch as English and Spanish, along with the rest of Romance languages in the sample and several other Germanic languages, represent two different poles of the typology. This has immediate consequences for the properties of these verbs cross-linguistically, which will be reflected in their lexical entries and first phase syntax. Furthermore, intra-linguistic differences are found within Germanic languages setting apart English from German, Swedish, or Icelandic. Finally, in section 3, I will deal with path expression in Romance and Germanic languages and its importance in the first phase syntax of posture verbs. Section 4 concludes the chapter.