XLVII
Articoli

Causativi e transitivi indoeuropei: fra comparazione e tipologia

Romano Lazzeroni
Dipartimento di Linguistica - Università di Pisa - Via Santa Maria 36 - 56126 Pisa (Italy)

Pubblicato 2010-01-16

Abstract

In Old Indian direct causative is encoded by a nasal infix, whereas indirect causative is encoded by the suffix -áya. In Old Indian, as well as in many other languages, mostly intransitive verbs produce indirect causative; the few transitive verbs that produce indirect causative are, indeed, ingestion verbs: these verbs fill intermediate slots in the transitivity/intransitivity continuum and share properties with both transitive and intransitive verbs. In this paper, an alternative explanation of the distribution of causative formations is also proposed relative to Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages, in which, unlike other Indo- European languages, the nasal infix encodes intransitive/anticausative verbs.