In my paper, I characterize the construction type exemplified by “John walked the horse” as the Causativization of Ergatives. (Abbreviated as CE) This characterization, following the line of transitivity/ergativity analysis within the British functional framework, will reveal the very intrinsic alteration between ergative and causative as semantic atoms.

0. Introduction

This article focuses on the characteristics of clauses such as:

(1) John walked the horse. (Lyons, 1968)

(2) The sergeant marched the soldiers.

The occurrence of this restricted phenomenon in the English language has been pointed out by a number of authors (Halliday 1967, 1968; Lyons 1968; Smith 1970; Cruse 1972, 1973; Davidse 1991, 1992; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1994, 1995). We define this phenomenon as Causativization of Ergatives, in that (1) and (2) are derived from the following corresponding ergatives:

(3) The horse walked.

(4) The soldiers marched.

The relationship between these ergative/non-ergative pairs is fairly obvious: while (1) can be interpreted as “John caused the horse to walk”, (2) has a likewise reading as “The sergeant caused the soldiers to march”. The conversion of the verb “walk” from (3) to (1) and “march” from (4) to (2) is realized by the adding of a causative meaning element into the ergative verb and an external argument in the subject position as Agent or Instigator. What remains constant during the conversion (or zero-derivation in another term) of the verb is the semantic role of the nominals “the horse” and “the soldiers” as the Actor, in spite of the shift from the subject to the object position. We name this kind of construal paradigms as Causativization of Ergatives.

As for the organization of this paper, in the first section I will review the related ergative and causative models so as to give a better understanding of the definition of CE. The second section concentrates on the characteristics of CE constructions, including the features of the verb that encodes the process and the noun that typically participates in the process. The third section describes the meaning components encoded in CE such as [accompaniment] [coercion] to unfold the whole semantic picture. And then, in the fourth part, a brief observation is made regarding the equivalent Chinese CE cases. Finally, the last section aims at the motivation behind this phenomenon and gives some tentative hypotheses to be tested.

1. Background: ergative and causative models revisited

1.1 Definition of CE

Before we can give a better description of the CE typology, we would rather choose the functional tradition as our starting point.

Functionalists like Halliday suggest that clauses function as the representation of processes, a term that covers all the “going-ons” of doing, happening, feeling, being and so on. The system of transivity specifies the different types of processes that are recognized in the language and structures by which they are expressed. A process consists potentially of three components: the process itself, which is typically encoded as verbal groups, participants in the process, which nominal groups realize, and circumstances associated with the process, which commonly surface as adverbial groups or prepositional phrases. In the Material Process that is central to our discussion here, the participants are specified as Goal and Actor, among which the Goal is obligatory implying “directed at” or “the one to which the process is extended”.

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However, to analyze sentence pairs like “the tourist ran” and “the lion chased the tourist”, Halliday introduces another system, namely ergativity, to show that the tourist did some running, either the running was instigated by the tourist himself, or else by some external agency. In this pattern, the older terminology of Goal and Actor are labeled as Medium, “the one through which the process is actualized and without which there would be no process at all”, and Instigator, the external agency involved, for instance, in the running of the tourist, which is beyond the nucleus of English clauses but obligatory in our CE constructions. Thus, the CE examples in the opening part can be illustrated as (3) and (4):

(3) (4)

John
Walked
The horse

The sergeant
marched
The soldiers

Instigator
Process
Medium

The horse
Walked

The soldiers
Marched

Medium
Process

Following this pattern, the CE model can be defined as “instigation of process” with co-participation of the clause, since the horse and the soldiers are executives of walking and marching respectively.

1.2 Characteristics of Ergatives

If we examine the lexicon of modern English, we find out that many of them carry the label “both transitive and intransitive”. Further, we find out that where the same verb occurs with each of these two values the clause pairs, with the given verb as Process, are usually ergative/non-ergative ones.

(5) a. The tourist woke. (ergative)

b. The lion woke the tourist. ( transitive)

(6) a. The boat sailed.

b. Mary sailed the boat.

(7) a. The cloth tore.

b. The nail tore the cloth.

These are familiar examples since the verbs like wake, sail, and tear are “Paired Ergatives” whose counterpart transitive subsenses are fairly common in English usage. We do not treat them as CE cases in the strict sense, for verbs like “walk, march” in the previous sections more typically function as intransitives, which can be manifested by corpus data.[1] Therefore, we take their transitive subsenses as derived or, more exactly, causativized from the ergative ones.

In this connection, however, more information about ergatives is needed. The concept of ergatives, which can be traced back to Relational Grammar, gets clarified for the first time by Perlmutter (1978). The “Uncausative Hypothesis”, as suggested by Permultter, states that there are two classes of intransitive verbs: unaccusatives/ergatives and unergatives. Semantically, they can be differentiated in that the subject of an unaccusatives verb “does not actively initiate or is not actively responsible for the action of the verb” but bears the semantic role of theme or patient that is usually associated with the object. In other words, unaccusatives subcategorize for one internal argument and no external argument, whereas unergatives subcategorize for one external argument without taking an internal one. It is pointed by Yip (1995) that the term unaccusative emphasizes the inability of ergative verbs to assign accusative case to the direct object, which therefore has to move to the subject position in order not to violate Case Filter. The following examples illustrate the ergative/unergative distinctions, in which ergatives may have another causative reading whereas unergatives cannot.

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(8) a. The vase broke. (ergative)

b. Antonia broke the vase. (causative)

(9) a. The boy cried. (unergative)

* b. We cried that boy. (causative)

Thus we introduce the following diagram for a distinct classification of verbs.

Verbs

Transitive Intransitive

(Hit, kick, break1, melt1)

Ergative Unergative

(Smile, cry, sleep)

Paired Unpaired

(Break2, melt2) (appear, exist, die)

1.3 Characteristics of causatives

Since our topic is the causativization of ergatives, here we are at a position of examining the inherent properties of causatives.

As is emphasized by Frawley (1992), causative events express some relation of determination between two events, with a prior event resulting in or giving rise to a subsequent event. Thus, causation is not an abstract predicate, but a relationship of a precipitating event (Ep) and a resulting event (Er). This change-of-state essence entails that the feature bundle inserted along with a causative must contain [+causative]、[+inchoative]、[+stative]. In this connection, “John killed Bill” can be interpreted as “John caused Bill to become dead”. This derivation can be illustrated by the following diagram.

Z kill X

Actually, the semantic atom of causative is common with languages; Languages differ mostly in how this element is encoded. Tigrinya, for instance, has a formal prefix a- to mark causativity; French and many other languages like Chinese in a similar way use a verb meaning “do” or “make”: English intransitive and transitive “cook” are translated into French by cuire and faire cuire.

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