Valency Alternations: Anti-Causative Constructions in MSA

Abstract

The present work is a study of anti-causative constructions in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The study highlights the various types of the construction and provides a characterisation of its various aspects. It indicates the thematic roles and syntactic properties of the arguments and investigates the relationship between the anti-causative verbs and their causative variants. It also shows the relationship between anti-causatives and other transitivity alternations such as passives and middles. The paper also presents an analysis of the types of the anti-causative constructions within the lexical functional grammar (LFG) approach; focusing on the argument structure and the functional structure representations and presents the mapping between the independent levels. The study thus contributes to a better description and understanding of the construction, and of argument structure, valency-change and the morphology-syntax interface.