Zero morphology and change-of-state verbs
Pavel Caha, Karen De Clercq, Guido Vanden Wyngaerd
February 2022 

We present a theory of conversion in terms of phrasal spellout. In this approach, there are no zero morphemes. Instead, the 'silent' meaning components are pronounced cumulatively within overt morphemes. As an empirical case, we discuss adjective/verb ambiguity as in 'narrow'. As verbs, these roots have both an inchoative and a causative sense. Following Ramchand (2008), we assume that such de-adjectival causatives contain three parts: the adjective denoting a state, a change-of-state component PROC, and a causative component INIT. Adopting a Nanosyntax approach, we propose that verbs like 'narrow' spell out a complex node with all these abstract heads. The ambiguity between the inchoative, causative and adjective falls out as a consequence of the Superset Principle(Starke 2009), which states that a lexical entry can spell out any subtree it contains. Since both the inchoative sense and the adjective sense correspond to proper parts of the causative one, we derive these readings without the need to postulate zeroes. We show how these assumptions allow us to capture the different patterns of the inchoative/causative alternation that are known from the typological literature.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005902 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	deadjectival verbs, change-of-state verbs, causative-inchoative alternation, nanosyntax, phrasal spellout, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [April 2021]
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