CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

This presentation focuses on the Causative alternation, which constitutes a Cross-language phenomenon well-attested among change of state verbs. On this account, we agree that understanding the nature of causal relations is crucial to the analysis of the causative alternation, which relates verbs with transitive and intransitive uses (L&RH 2011). By assessing data such as 'el chocolate engorda', we will be lead to claim that Romance allows constructions not featuring what is, in most languages, an inescapable constituent: the Undergoer/patient/theme of the event (cf. *Chocolate fattens). More importantly, the absence of the Undergoer correlates nicely with the absence of the corresponding projection (Process Projection), which is generally defined as the dynamic heart of the predication (Ramchand 2007). Indeed, data suggests that these construction do not behave as eventive types do, but as states. In conclusion, empirical data lead us to postulate that: (i)Lexical items may not necessarily provided of minimal syntactic information which allows them to be inserted in the syntactic structures. Restrictions would be determined by extragrammatical domains (ii) Eventive projections (ProcP, InitP) are both left to be realized by merge later in the derivation in Romance. (iii)PATH (projected by the A head) would be allowed to conflate either with an Init or a Proc head (or both, by reMerge (cf. Starke 2001) at a later stage of derivation) (iv) None of these projections would be lexically identified by default (avoid lexical proliferation of three different entries accounting for the Av and Bv variants). (v) The behavior of the alternative lacking the Undergoer matches the proposal of both flaking eventualities being states (Ramchand 2007) All in all, the data introduced here provides Further evidence of the strict correlation between argument structure and eventive composition of the predicate (No undergoer, no process).

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