Anticausatives: Against reflexivization

Anticausative (unaccusative) verbs are not formed by a reflexivization operation. Contrary to claims advanced in recent studies, there is no evidence that they involve a Cause ingredient either in their lexical semantic representation or in the syntax. A series of arguments show that.

► Anticausatives (unaccusatives) are not formed by a reflexivization(-type) operation. ► There is no evidence that anticausatives involve any sort of Cause ingredient. ► In some languages the by itself modifier corresponds to 2 items licensed differently. ► If a negated anticausative and its affirmative transitive cooccur neg is metalinguistic. ► Cause adjuncts are no evidence that the sentence (per se) contains a Cause component.