The causative/inchoative alternation

Abstract

This chapter addresses the alternation that involves verbs such as melt, which can appear in transitive/causative (I melted the butter in the pan) and intransitive/inchoative (The butter melted) sentence frames. This alternation is realized in different ways cross-linguistically. After a brief overview of theoretical characterizations of this alternation, we focus on the acquisition problem: for a given target language, how do learners identify which verbs participate in the causative alternation and which ones do not? We provide a summary of the latest research on this topic across various acquisition contexts, including first language development, heritage language bilingualism, and second language acquisition. We discuss various L1–L2 combinations to show how overgeneralization and omission errors arise in acceptability and production tasks involving the causative-inchoative alternation. In addition, we make a series of methodology-related recommendations, including the use of videos (rather than still images) to depict inchoative events without an external cause.