The psych causative alternation

In this paper, we argue that Greek and Romanian exhibit a psych causative alternation. Evidence for this comes from the following empirical domains: first, object experiencer verbs alternate with subject experiencer forms and the morphology is the same as in the causative alternation. Second, these languages use special prepositions to mark causers in change of state readings, which allows us to disambiguate between verb pairs that instantiate a causative alternation and those that do not. We show that this distinction is tied up with the aspectual value of the particular interpretations. Furthermore, we will show that the few alternating psych verbs in English do not exhibit a causative alternation. Our results thus lead to a better understanding of causation in psych verbs. In Greek and Romanian causers may be realized both with object experiencer and subject experiencer verbs, but in English they only appear with the former, as Pesetsky (1995) argues. As English has the causative alternation in the non-psych domain, our discussion raises the question of the crosslinguistic availability of the psych causative alternation. We speculate that English lacks the causative alternation as a result of diachronic changes that relate to lability and its Voice system.