Action/Result in Indonesian Accomplishment Verbs and the Agent Control Hypothesis
Yosuke Sato
January 2021 

In this paper, I document and analyze the strong link between the agentivity of the external argument of causative accomplishment verbs and their non-culminating interpretations in Indonesian. Descriptively, I present a wide range of novel examples in Indonesian from my original fieldwork to support the cross-linguistic robustness of the so-called Agent Control Hypothesis (Demirdache and Martin 2015; Martin 2015, 2019, 2020). Theoretically, adapting the recent approach developed by Martin (2015, 2020) to Indonesian, I propose that the relevant link is accounted for by the interaction of the different number of sub-events in agentive vs. non-agentive causation (namely, the agent’s action + theme’s result state sub-events in the former vs. only the theme’s result state sub-event in the latter) with the Maximal Stage Requirement of the partitive perfective operator PFVM (Krifka 1989; Koenig and Muansuwan 2000; Altshuler 2014).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005677 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	accepted
keywords:	non-culminating accomplishment, indonesian, agent control hypothesis, split vp hypothesis, agentive causation, non-agentive causation, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [January 2021]
Downloaded:	385 times

 

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