An explanation of causal-noncausal verb pairs, such as bang (tr.)/ (intr.) or ring (intr.)/(tr.)
What is it about?
What factors are involved in triggering causal-noncausal verb alternations, such as: “The doorbell rang” => “Someone rang the doorbell” or “Someone banged the door” =>”The door banged”? This paper explains the issue not only in terms of usage frequency but also by taking a historical perspective on English sound-emission verbs.
Why is it important?
In this article the author argues that for a linguistic pair there is a strong correlation in terms of frequency between form and earlier occurrence and thereby proposes the earlier occurrence – frequency correspondence principle, which not only provides good evidence for but also complements Haspelmath et al.’s (2014) form-frequency correspondence principle in that the former principle can account for the verb pairs that the latter principle cannot, in particular, English causal-noncausal verb pairs, which have the same verb form for the causal and the noncausal use. It is expected that the present analysis of causal-noncausal verb pairs based on the former principle can be applied mutatis mutandis (that is, if necessary changes are made while not affecting the main point at issue) to other kinds of verb or construction alternations as well. Thus, analyses adopting a historical perspective will shed new light on issues involving verb/construction alternations, interactions between alternations, and grammaticization.