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Why we need a token-based typology: A case study of analytic and lexical causatives in fifteen European languages

  • Natalia Levshina EMAIL logo
From the journal Folia Linguistica

Abstract

This paper investigates variation of lexical and analytic causatives in 15 European languages from the Germanic, Romance, and Slavic genera based on a multilingual parallel corpus of film subtitles. Using typological parameters of variation of causatives from the literature, this study tests which parameters are relevant for the choice between analytic and lexical causatives in the sample of languages. The main research question is whether the variation is constrained by one semantic dimension, namely, the conceptual integration of the causing and caused events, as suggested by previous research on iconicity in language, or whether several different semantic and syntactic factors are at play. To answer this question, I use an exploratory multivariate technique for categorical data (Multiple Correspondence Analysis with supplementary points) and conditional random forests, a nonparametric regression and classification method. The study demonstrates the importance of corpus data in testing typological hypotheses.

Acknowledgments

The author is very grateful to Hubert Cuyckens, Karolina Krawczak, Michael Cysouw, and an anonymous reviewer for their invaluable criticisms and suggestions, as well as to Jose Garcia Miguel and Björn Wiemer for their consultations on some tricky language-specific constructions. I am also indebted to my ex-colleagues from the Catholic University of Louvain, Ludivine Cribble and Samantha Laporte, who helped me to obtain the measures of interrater agreement. The main part of this research was funded by a postdoctoral grant received from the Belgian research foundation F.R.S.-FNRS. All usual disclaimers apply.

Abbreviations

1/2/3

first/second/third person

acc

accusative

fut

future

inf

infinitive

pfv

perfective

pl

plural

prs

present

refl

reflexive

sg

singular

Abbreviations used in figures

bg

Bulgarian

cs

Czech

de

German

en

English

es

Spanish

fr

French

it

Italian

nl

Dutch

no

Norwegian

pl

Polish

pt

Portuguese

ro

Romanian

ru

Russian

sl

Slovenian

sv

Swedish

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Received: 2015-5-25
Revised: 2015-11-17
Revised: 2016-2-9
Accepted: 2016-5-31
Published Online: 2016-11-8
Published in Print: 2016-11-1

©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton

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