ERGATIVE STRATEGIES OF FREQUENTLY USED IN ENGLISH, GERMAN, FRENCH, DUTCH AND DANISH

A corpus based comparison

Martin Godts Student number: 19804004

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Miriam Taverniers

A dissertation submitted to Ghent University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Advanced Studies in Linguistics - Linguistics in a Comparative Perspective.

Academic year: 2019 – 2020

Ergative strategies of frequently used verbs in English, German, French, Dutch and Danish A corpus based comparison

Martin Godts

word count 45864(*)

v29c / August 15, 2020

* Word count as calculated by NumWord function, including all tables.

Acknowledgements

After I graduated in 1978 I got married, got a job, got children, a house and pretty much everything else one can wish for.

After a varied and satisfying career I retired in 2019 and now I can fulfil my final dream : go back to university and catch up with linguistics. Language is so fascinating!

This year has been great. I have enjoyed the courses so much, the university is still the place to be.

I can only thank my wife, my mum, my children, my grandchildren for supporting me. Especially my grandchildren take an interest in ‘opa’ going to school : I’m one of them now.

Studying, reading and researching was very satisfying. I went to bed with many authors, reading their books and papers and waking up the next morning with fresh knowledge and new ideas. During this period Covid19 struck. It has been on my mind for two and a half months blocking my work. On May 31 I was able to resume the writing of this thesis.

My personal research led to new insights every day. This kept me going and wondering and asking myself new questions about the processes involved in language specifically in the context of this thesis, but also in general.

A special thanks to my promoter, professor Taverniers : she is a talented teacher and a great guide. I also thank professor Van Peteghem : she is a great motivator. The same goes for professor Davidse – I only met her once, but it was an awestriking and stimulating experience. Thanks to the board of professors who read my first draft. Their constructive comments have been a great help.

August 15, 2020

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Contents

Contents i Appendix 1 (including electronic documents) iii Appendix 2 iii List of Abbreviations iv List of Tables vi List of Figures vii Preface 1. Some information 1 2. Possible Issues 2

Introduction 4

Part 1 – Framework

1. Introduction 6 2. Verbs, subjects and objects 7 3. Transitive and intransitive use of verbs 8 4. Ambi-transitive verbs 9 5. The passive 9 6. and 10 7. Transitivity and semantics 11 8. Cross-linguistic comparison of default forms of verbs in active and 12 9. The role of aspect 14 10. Ergative, middle and passive constructions 15 11. Ergativity 17 12. Ergativity cross-linguistically in German, French, Dutch and Danish 19 13. Summary of popular concurrent forms of ‘open’ (V+adj) per language 20 14. Other cross-linguistic approaches 21 15. To alternate or not? 23 16. To alternate 24

Part 2 – Data Collection

Section 2.1 Methodology 26 1. Introduction : corpora used 26 2. Establish a ranking of frequently used verbs in English 27 3. Establish a ranking of frequently used verbs in German, French, 28 Dutch and Danish 4. Make the data on ergative verbs in English available 28 5. Match the main English ergative verbs with their translation 29 equivalent in German, French, Dutch and Danish 6. Establish a cross-linguistic ranking of these verbs 29 7. Make a selection for analysis 30 Section 2.2 Selection 31

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Part 3 – Research and analysis

Section 3.1 Methodology 35 1. Introduction 35 2. A first dataset is general, using general agents / media / patients 35 3. A second dataset is constructed, using frequently used mediums and 36 he/she as instigator 4. A third dataset uses obvious collocates, in this case mediums that 36 show up about equally frequent as subject and as object in English 5. Translating the datasets 38 6. Data storage 38 7. Focus of the study and possible issues with machine translation 40 8. MS-Access proceedings 40 9. Introduction of aspect as part of the ergative strategy 45

Section 3.2 Analysis and observations 48 3.2.1. Features per Language 49 1. English 49 2. German 53 3. French 56 4. Dutch 59 5. Danish 62 3.2.2. Cross linguistic Statistics 65 1. Basic strategies 65 2. Cross-linguistic labile strategies 66 3. Cross-linguistic anticausative strategies 67 4. Cross-linguistic resultative strategies 68 5. Cross-linguistic strategies matched with semantic clusters 69 3.2.3. Cross-linguistic Structural Interpretation 70 1. Structural Variation in Transitive clauses 70 2. Structural Variation in Intransitive clauses 77 3. Structural Variation in Alternations 88 3.2.4. Cross-linguistic Semantic Comparisons 91 1. {‘open’, ‘close’, ‘shut’} cluster 91 2. {‘begin’, ’start’, ’stop’, ’end’, ’finish’, ’continue’} cluster 93 3. {‘change’, ’turn’, ’develop’, ’increase’, ’improve’, ’decrease’} cluster 96 4. {‘break’, ‘crack’, ’rip’, ’split’, ’tear’, ’burn’} cluster 99 5. {‘play’, ‘run’, ‘move’, ‘download’} cluster 103 6. Overviews 105

Part 4 – Conclusions 108

References 112

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Appendix 1

Contents

Appendix (separate document)

1 Ergative verbs - McMillion’s List & Collins’s List 1

2 Selection - Cross-linguistic list of frequently used verbs linked to list of Ergative verbs 40 / Including Ranking-Score

3 Pilot study based on Internet Frequency Lists 67

4 Frequently used mediums 69

Extra (electronic documents) 1 eCorpora : MS-Access Database 2 AnaData2v2 : MS-Access Database 3 Dataset translations ANA3 : MS-Excel Worksheet 4 Rawdata eStrategies : MS-Excel Worksheet 5 Calc : MS-Excel Worksheet

Notice: All documents including the databases and the worksheets are available a) At this URL : MASTERPROEF MGODTS 2020 DATA ONLINE b) https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ai7ZUc-IF2uIpHb7M2Xj7dhH1MU0?e=Vv8u9H (or copy and paste link into your browser) c) Via e-mail to [email protected]

Appendix 2

Contents

Datasets 2

Dataset 1 : general, using general agents / media /patients 2 Dataset 2 : constructed, using frequently used mediums and he/she as instigator 3 Dataset 3 : collocates, in this case mediums that show up about equally frequently 4 as subject and as object in English.

Table – Edited Cross Linguistic overview of verbal entries in the eStrategies table 6

Edited Table – Splitdata v2 (original table available in the MS-Access database 12 AnaData2v2)

Comparative table - Structural Variation in Alternations 38

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List of Abbreviations

A agent Codes: (A) active voice **** main/major, 80-100% AC anticausative *** important, 50-80% AD be + past : f(adj) ** less important, 20-50% Adj * 1 or a few, 5-20% AP adverbial phrase APA active simple past Worksheets: APC active present continuous COL-D Collocates-DeepL MT A/P voice syncretism COL-DEEPL APP active present perfect (have) COL-G Collocates-DeepL MT ASP active simple present COL-GOOGLE BA be + adjective CON-D Constructions-DeepL MT BAD be + CON-DEEPL BI be + idiom phrase CON-G Constructions-Google MT BP be + past participle CON-GOOGLE BPP active present perfect (be) GEN-D, BPV se + BP GEN-DEEPL Generalizations-DeepL MT BPS BP + PP GEN-G, Generalizations-Google MT BNC British National Corpus GEN-GOOGLE

C (C) continuous (aspect) <- precedence (CP) perfective -> result D Danish D1,D2 etc. derivation DC Danish corpus verb verb in English E English ‘verb’ meaning of verb (E) eternal, timeless tense tense in English EC English corpus ‘tense’ equivalent tense EPP reflexive present perfect (have) F French {…} set, collection FC French corpus f(…) function G German ∩ cross-section GC German corpus (HR) repeated actions L labile LAB labile alternation possible L1 Native speakers L2 Non-native speakers MT Machine Translation N , Dutch NC Dutch corpus NLA non-labile ergative NMT neural machine translation NP noun phrase np, non-periph non-periphrastic O object

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OANC Open American National Corpus OTT simple present (Dutch) OVT simple past (Dutch) P patient p, periph periphrastic (P) passive voice (PA) past tense pAC prototypical AC alternation PAS agentless passive alternation PAP passive auxiliary + Past Participle PI verbal idiom pLAB prototypical labile alternation PP prepositional phrase PP present perfect + PP PPV present perfect + VP (PR) present tense PSP (trans.) simple past + PP PSP (intrans.) simple present passive PSV simple past + VP PV phrasal verb R (verb) root R (strategy) resultative RBP reflexive present perfect (be) RSP reflexive simple present S subject S (strategy) suppletive (S) simple (aspect) SC structural change SHT ergative strategy switch SP s-passive SPP simple present + PP SPS simple present + s-suffix SPV simple present + VP SV suffixed verb strat strategy V verb VP verb phrase vp verbal particle VTT present perfect (Dutch)

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List of tables

1 Shares in WWW-content, L2 and L1 speakers as global percentages 2 Unaccusative verbs and alternations 3 Comparison of agentive S + V 4 Comparison of intransitive S + V 5 Comparison of passive voice S + V 6 Comparison of be + adjective / adjective + N 7 Tense and aspect, examples and main T(ense)- and A(spect)-use 8 Verbs in clause alternations according to Haspelmath (1993: 91-92) 9 Strategies in German, French and English according to Haspelmath (1993: 101) 10 Corpora used in this study 11 Selection of English verbs, exemplary for the cross-linguistic meaning 12 Ranking of cross-linguistic meanings as they appeared 13 Initial cross-linguistic dataset 14 Scores Quality of Translation from and to English 15 Record-structure eStrategies table 16 Cross-linguistic overview of verbal entries in the eStrategies table 17 # of Entries in eStrategies table 18 English dataset VPs from eStrategies table through QeSynonyms English query 19 Summary of occurrence of VPs in English selection 20 Common English ergative strategies in this selection 21 German dataset VPs from eStrategies table through QeSynonyms German query 22 Common German ergative strategies in this selection 23 French dataset VPs from eStrategies table through QeSynonyms French query 24 Common French ergative strategies in this selection 25 Dutch dataset VPs from eStrategies table through QeSynonyms Dutch query 26 Common Dutch ergative strategies in this selection 27 Danish dataset VPs from eStrategies table through QeSynonyms Danish query 28 Common Danish ergative strategies in this selection 29 Basic ergative strategies as they occur cross-linguistically 30 Be+f(adj) perfective alternatives cross-linguistically 31 Implementation of causative and anticausative alternations 32 Meanings with cross-linguistic labile strategies in all languages 33 Meanings with cross-linguistic labile strategies in four languages 34 Meanings with cross-linguistic anticausative strategies 35 Meanings with cross-linguistic resultative strategies in most languages 36 Summary of cross-linguistic strategies matched with semantic clusters 37 Clause structure of the original English clauses 38 Summary of tense use in the transitive clauses of this research 39 Overview of all VP occurrences in the transitive clauses 40 German ‘Reflexive’ Active Present Perfect with haven as auxiliary as observed in anticausative clauses 41 ‘Active Present Perfect’ with ‘be’-VPs in anticausative intransitive clauses in German, French, Dutch and Danish 42 VPs in intransitive clauses in French with être as auxiliary and with and without se insertion 43 Cross-linguistic ‘be + past participle’ : f(adj) aka passive simple present syncretism 44 ‘Be’ + adjective/adverb occurrences in intransitive clauses 45 Overview of all VP occurrences observed in intransitive clauses 46 Cross-linguistic counts of potential ergative strategies 47 Frequently used mediums with ‘open’ across languages 48 Frequently used mediums with ‘close’ across languages

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49 Frequently used mediums with ‘shut’ across languages 50 Frequently used mediums with ‘begin’ across languages 51 Frequently used mediums with ‘start’ across languages 52 Frequently used mediums with ‘stop’ across languages 53 Frequently used mediums with ‘end’ across languages 54 Frequently used mediums with ‘finish’ across languages 55 Frequently used mediums with ‘continue’ across languages 56 Frequently used mediums with ‘change’ across languages 57 Frequently used mediums with ‘turn’ across languages 58 Frequently used mediums with ‘develop’ across languages 59 Frequently used mediums with ‘increase’ across languages 60 Frequently used mediums with ‘improve’ across languages 61 Frequently used mediums with ‘decrease’ across languages 62 Frequently used mediums with ‘break’ across languages 63 Frequently used mediums with ‘crack’ across languages 64 Frequently used mediums with ‘rip’ across languages 65 Frequently used mediums with ‘split’ across languages 66 Frequently used mediums with ‘tear’ across languages 67 Frequently used mediums with ‘burn’ across languages 68 Frequently used mediums with ‘play’ across languages 69 Frequently used mediums with ‘run’ across languages 70 Frequently used mediums with ‘move’ across languages 71 Frequently used mediums with ‘download’ across languages 72 Translation equivalents correspondence ranking 73 Cross-cluster comparison of frequently used mediums in ergative alternations

List of Figures

1 Western Europe, the cradle of the languages compared 2 The lexicogrammar cline from Halliday 1994: 64 – fig. 2.6 3 Table Selection (Selectie) – Sample of Selection 4 Data streams between Data sources, corpora and selections 5 Example of collocates retrieval using Sketch Engine

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Preface

This is a functional and typological comparative study of lexical ergativity in English, German, French Dutch and Danish built around a selection of frequently used verbs and their translation equivalents across these languages. Essential in my approach is that I focus on the use and the cross-linguistic meanings of the verbs involved since lexical ergativity is primarily linked to meaning as Levin (1993) and Levin and Rappaport (1994) pointed out.

Any dictionary can exemplify that verbs by default generate specific, possibly multiple, meanings in relation to the collocates they are used with. In the context of lexical ergativity the medium, either functioning as subject or object to the verb, is the determining factor. Depending on their mutual grammatical and lexical restrictions and finetuned by the overall context, language users combining a verb with a medium, create one or more concrete or abstract meanings, either imaginable and understandable or cryptic and confusing and in both cases possibly, but not necessarily, grammatically correct.

1. Some information

As commonly known, French is a Romance language and English, German, French and Dutch are Germanic languages. The countries where these languages are spoken form one contiguous area and at one time or another, often for longer periods in the last two millennia, two or more of these

Figure 1 - Western Europe, the cradle of the languages compared

1 countries used to be part of a larger kingdom or empire where people lived together, traded and waged wars with or against each other. In addition, they have shared languages, culture, history, religion and many other things. This area has had - and still has - a lot of language contact and since multilingualism is of all times, it is not uncommon to know at least the basics of all five languages, which is a prerequisite to endeavor a comparative linguistic study.

The importance of English as a first language is clear – this is where the UK and its present and former Commonwealth realms and the United States come in - but it is also the main second and foreign language of this planet. Hence it is no coincidence that this thesis is written in English. Neither is it a coincidence that I use English as an access to the features of the other languages because much more has been written in English on these features than in any other language.

Additionally, internet data play an important role in this study and since it is obvious there is much more web contents in English than in any other language I choose to start from an extensive collection of English labile verbs in lexical ergative alternations, match these verbs with their translation equivalents in the other languages and rank them cross-linguistically on the basis of their frequency of use in web-based corpora, in order to obtain a selection of about 25 common verb meanings that are potentially ergative.

These verbs are used in alternating clauses where each language is used in turn as source language to translate the clauses into the target languages and back. I compare the strategies that emerge and embed my observations through a comparative frequency analysis in a theory of ergative strategies as it will be developed in the next chapters, confirming and extending the status quaestionis on this topic. The goal of this comparative study is to describe ergative strategies, confirm linguistic features and make a personal analysis of lexical ergativity and adjacent concepts. In my conclusion I will plea to broaden the contemporary view on lexical ergativity to include strategies that emerge from translation equivalence and linguistic syncretism.

This research is one on the use of languages and consequently the data are collected from systems that are based on user input of many users and many written sources. Both the users and the sources comprise all levels and proficiencies of language. Nonetheless, most of it is acceptable language, at least for functional linguists who focus on the actual language use. In this respect, I am a linguistic miner, for I consider language a public tool to be combined with a repository of all kinds of linguistic resources.

2. Possible issues

Some background information and a broader perspective seems apt, especially because of possible issues with the methodology used.

There are parts of the world, where most people do not understand English, German, French, Dutch or Danish, but according to the records of Infoplease1, at least one of these languages is spoken in 70% of the countries in the world2, either as a first, a second or a foreign language. Add tourist

1 As retrieved from Infoplease, part of the FEN Learning family of educational and reference sites https://www.infoplease.com/world/countries/languages-spoken-in-each-country-of-the-world on July 2 2020. 2 If you know just 9 languages, they will understand you in 90% of the countries: forget about Danish (even most Danes speak English or German), but add Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish. If you want to speak to as many people as possible, just learn these 8 languages: English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese and Swahili. This accounts for 56% of the world population. (my estimates on the basis of the data) 2 guides, business people and professors and you get 100%. English is spoken in half the countries of the world, French in 25% and German in 7% of the countries, Dutch and Danish are spoken in a handful of countries. SIL International3 has data on the global number of speakers and according to their 2019 edition between 1.3 and 2 billion people speak4 English, depending on the criteria chosen. Additionally, about 275 million people speak French and 130 million speak German, there are close to 30 million speakers of Dutch and approximately 6 million people speaking Danish.

In contrast, there are only about 380 million native English speakers, that is a little less than 5 % of the world population and French (80 million) and German (79 million) are each spoken natively by just 1% of the world. This implicates that at least 70% of English and French and 40% of German is not spoken natively. However, only about 17% of Dutch and less than 4 % of Danish is spoken by non-native speakers.

Finally, W3Tech.com has data on the content languages for websites5 and apparently 59.5% of all content is in English, 2.7% is in German and 2.7% is in French, 0.7% is in Dutch and 0.2% is in Danish.

The next table summarizes the main data retrieved:

Table 1 - Shares in WWW-content, L2 and L1 speakers as global percentages

% Web Content % L2 Speakers % L1 Speakers English 59,5% 16,7-25,6% 4,9% French 2,7% 3,5% 1,0% German 2,7% 1,7% 1,0% Dutch 0,7% 0,4% 0,3% Danish 0,2% 0,1% 0,1%

My observations are:

1. The percentage of English web content is disproportionate to the percentage of English L1s in the world. 2. There are many more English, French and German L2s than there are L1s. 3. Dutch and Danish are mainly used by L1s 4. The amount of web content in French and German corresponds with the number of L1s. 5. English is a “main” language. French and German are “important” languages and their L1s each represent 1% of the world population. Dutch and Danish are “less important” on a world scale.

It is not part of this paper to interpret these data, but they illustrate a possible effect on my methodology since I use web-based corpora and machine translation on the basis of translated datasets. Table 1 illustrates that for English, French and German a substantial part of the data must have been provided by non-native speakers. There is no way to exclude second language or foreign language users but I explain in part 2, description of my methodology, how I deal with possible threats and biases.

3 As retrieved from Etnologue.com on July 2 2020. 4 And not everyone can read or write English or the other languages... 5 Data from https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language, retrieved July 2 2020 3

Introduction

On our first meeting, professor Taverniers inquired if I was acquainted with the concept of ergativity in English. I was not. She gave an example: John opened the door./ The door opened.

The object of the first sentence becomes the subject of the second sentence. It is as if the door now performs the action by itself… This type of alteration is quite common in English she said. How would you say that in Dutch? I tried, John opent de deur. De deur opent… I mused… No, that is not what we say… We say De deur gaat open! And in German? I tried again… John öffnet die Tür… I hesitated… Die Tür öffnet sich… Right! I thought of French, Il ouvre la porte. / La porte s’ouvre , and Danish, Han åbner døren. Døren åbnes. At that moment, it struck me, that in the languages I know, in each of them we express this in a different way.

The seminar about ergativity was a real eye-opener since I had never been aware of this phenomenon and it intrigued me. I discovered soon that a lot had been written about this topic in the last thirty years. In fact, it was one of the most studied alternations. As a consequence, my curiosity grew.

I developed this further in a course paper that focused on ten English verbs, which according to the literature were prototypical for this alternation. I used them in 10 common clauses and studied the translation equivalents in English, German, French, Dutch and Danish. Often, there were alternative translations, some preferred, others less frequent or uncommon. It also became clear to me, that the role of the object/subject – by that time I was talking about the “medium” -, was essential in allowing the alternations: one can easily say He opens the door / the door opens, but He opened the bottles / The bottles opened seems not acceptable, or at least not without additional context or phrase. The bottles opened in shipping would do in a certain, imaginable context. In other words, prototypical lexical ergativity seems to be restricted, not only to a limited number of verbs, mainly expressing a change of state, but also to a limited set of mediums that can function in this configuration. Expanding the clause with a prepositional object might help somewhat, as exemplified above and in Collins Cobuild data concerning ergativity, where about half of the constructions include a prepositional object, but very soon one reaches the limits of the ergative configurability since with a lot of verbs, either originally transitive or intransitive, it is hard to find more than a few convincing examples of the alternate form with the same medium.

Studying alternations is a linguistic technique that can lead to new insights. Concerning the ergative alternation, also known as the causative-anticausative alternation, this might even mimic a common type of reasoning where one first describes an event including all participants and thereafter the resulting state omitting the actor-instigator to shift the focus to the medium-patient. The choices between expressing something in either a causative transitive way, an anticausative intransitive manner, as a perfective or resultative state or in an active dynamic fashion seem comparable purpose-driven thought strategies. Consciously or unconsciously we all attempt to use the right words in a fitting way in a specific situation.

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In this dissertation I continue my research. The research questions I want to answer are these: What are the main6 and alternative ergative strategies of English, German, French, Dutch and Danish? How important/productive is each strategy in each language? How do they compare? How do they translate? How much (in)consistency does this involve? To what extent does meaning in a general or specific lexical context play a role? and Is there anything in this comparison that sheds new light on lexical ergativity?

In the first part I situate ergativity in terms of grammar, in order to sketch a clear picture of the grammar involved and develop a few cross-linguistic issues. In a second part I select the data for my comparison. In my methodology I use four corpora for English and two corpora for each other language via the Sketch-Engine interface. I determine which verbs that have ergative alternations in English are most frequently used in the languages of this research. To confirm their ergative use I match the English verbs with McMillion’s list (2006) and the list of the online Cobuild Dictionary (1996-2020). From this collection I select 25 verbal meanings and their translation equivalents in each language. The fact that the verbs are chosen on the basis of frequency does not guarantee the display of more ergative meanings. On the other hand, more use could also imply more possible mediums and contexts. Whatever the result, I am confident this approach has a potential to deliver new insights.

In a third part I build a datasheet collection with the verbs from the second part used in general clauses, constructed clauses and clauses with common collocates showing up in both transitive and intransitive clauses. In order to obtain reliable user data, I use three online translators (Google Translate, Bing Translation and DeepL) that make use of user input and NMT7 technology. I translate back and forth between these systems in search of (in)consistencies. I import the data for further processing into a database management system and use relational query techniques to retrieve and analyze the data, confirming “typical” ergative strategies, but also eliciting particular alternative strategies. All this leads to a series of observations and conclusions concerning the ergative strategies in each language in our comparison. Additionally, I rank all strategies involved, interpret my observations and elaborate on the similarities and contrasts between the languages. In a final section I concentrate on the specific use of each cross-linguistic meaning and exemplify that a discussion of medium context, object properties and tense and aspect of the events, states or processes is relevant.

6 ‘Main’ in terms of frequency: I will first determine which verbs are mainly used cross-linguistically in an ergative context. I will show how to build a cross-linguistic dataset of frequently used verbs. 7 Neural Machine Translation – see part two, section 2.1 5

Part one – Framework

1. Introduction

In this chapter I sketch the framework in which this research is embedded. I owe much to the insights of descriptive linguistics (Jespersen, Curme) , the approach of Comrie on aspect, the innovative system of functional linguistics (Halliday, Davidse, Taverniers), the ergative topology of Dixon, Haspelmath’s method of illuminating causative/inchoative alternations and his recent paper on depth of analysis, the data on English lability by McMillion and in Collins Cobuild Dictionary and ultimately the broadening view of Abraham on linguistic syncretism.

After the introduction of verbs in relation to objects and subjects, I zoom in on different types of transitive and intransitive clauses and alternations, involving transitivity, valency, voice, tense, aspect and semantics. I then frame the concept of ergativity as it will be applied cross-linguistically in this research and describe some other cross-linguistic approaches. Eventually, with Davidse, I explore and underwrite the arguments in favor of a semantic corpus-based approach of lexical ergativity.

The linguistic framework of this study starts with the Danish descriptive linguist Otto Jespersen (1860-1943) whose basic grammatical concepts concerning transitive and intransitive verbs form a first level in my approach.

In 1978, when I graduated from this university, transformational grammar was mainstream. I still think universal grammar is a challenging concept, but discovering aspects of systemic functional grammar opened up a new world that appeals to me because I can identify with Halliday’s key concepts. Halliday, a student of J.R. Firth, an English linguist and the first professor of general linguistics in Great Britain, owed him the idea that language is a system with a set of choices. Just like Firth (London School) and Malinowski (Prague School), Halliday puts context of situation central in his view of language. In addition, he claims his grammar is functional because it relates to language use. Besides, meaning in language consists of functional components and he goes on specifying that “each element in a language is explained by reference to its function in the total linguistic system”(Halliday 1994: xiii-xiv). In that respect, all grammars are functional, which sounds like de Saussure saying “Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of one term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others.”(de Saussure 1915,1959: 114) Further, language consists of “levels” (Berry 1975) and one of these levels is the form of the language. This form consists of grammar and lexis.

Halliday (1961, 1994), who distinguishes 5 levels of descriptive analysis (phonic, phonological, grammatical, lexical and contextual), considers lexis and grammar as the two poles of a single cline, continuum or unity. In this continuum, grammar on one end is a closed system, general in meaning and general in its description of language structure, lexis on the other end consists of open sets, specific in their meaning due to the collocation of words in a stratum (or layer) of wording. (Halliday 1994: 64) – see figure from the same source on the next page:

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Figure 2 – The lexicogrammar cline from Halliday 1994: 64 – fig 2.6

Additionally, lexical items can be classed as belonging to 8 word classes: noun, , adjective, numeral, verb, preposition, adverb, and each class can consist of subclasses, e.g. noun {proper noun, common noun, } while grammar and grammatical rules continue to be important and form the core of the structure of both spoken and written language. However, it is accepted that the rules, especially in spoken grammar, may be variable to a certain extent. (Carter 1998: 51)

2. Verbs, subjects and objects

Jespersen (1933: 74-77) already refers to the complex relation between verbs, subjects and objects when he points out that some verbs denote actions, that others express some kind of “suffering” (ibid.: 74) on the part of the subject and that some other verbs can do both (1a-b).

(1a) He broke a twig. Verb denotes action. (1b) He broke a leg. Verb denotes suffering.

Some verbs he thinks of as “double faced in a curious way” (ibid.: 74) e.g. ‘The garden swarms with bees.’ approximately meaning the same as ‘Bees swarm in the garden.’ In his view, subjects are “intimately” (ibid.: 75) connected with the verb and objects are too, but less intimately i.e. the connection is indirect, there is more distance. To find the subject of (2a), you just take the as it used in the clause and ask Who or What ? (ibid.: 66, example 2b) while to find the object, you have to rephrase the question and include the subject in the question as an intermediate: Who does ? (ibid.: 75, example 2c) or, in the case of a prepositional object functioning as a temporal adverbial, include both the subject and the object as intermediates in the question and ask When ? (ibid.: 75, example 2d)

(2a) He kisses his wife in the morning. (2b) Who kisses? He. (2c) Who does he kiss? His wife. (2d) When does he kiss his wife? In the morning.

He claims that with every other object the meaning of the verb can be different (ibid.: 75). Consequently, it is not possible to define the relation of verb and object in a simple way. To strengthen his claim he distinguishes various objects of result (3a-f) and also exemplifies verbs that can be used alternatively with an object or a prepositional phrase (4a-b).

(3a) John wrote a letter. (3b) We picked flowers / a quarrel. (3c) I dreamt a curious dream. (3d) He entered a house / his name in a list. (3e) He waited his turn / dinner. (3f) She turned the handle / prose into verse / a corner.

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(4a) We know him / of him. (4b) We meet a person / in person / all claims / with him / with an accident.

3. Transitive and intransitive use of verbs

If a verb has an object, we call it transitive, otherwise it is intransitive. In English many verbs can be used both transitively and intransitively, which Jespersen (1933: 82-84) acknowledges “when the meaning of the object is evident from the context”(ibid.: 82, examples 5a-d ) in the awareness that “verbs of motion and change” (ibid.: 82) are often used in both senses (6a-b, 7a-b, 8a-b, 9a-b, 10a- b,11).

(5a) He plays the violin. Transitive (5b) He plays well. Intransitive

(5c) He smokes cigars. Transitive (5d) She does not smoke. Intransitive

(6a) He moves a stone. Transitive (6b) The stone moves. Intransitive

(7a) She changes the subject. Transitive (7b) The fashion changes. Intransitive

(8a) He turned the leaf. Transitive (8b) The current turns. Intransitive

(9a) We begin the play. Transitive (9b) The play begins at eight. Intransitive

(10a) They end the discussion. Transitive (10b) The meeting ends at ten. Intransitive

(11) The soldiers burned everything Transitive that would burn. Intransitive

Verbs that are used intransitively do this by themselves or “through an inward impulse” (ibid.: 82) e.g. ‘The stone rolled down the hill.’ is different from ‘The stone was rolled down the hill.’ Jespersen considered many of these verbs as (ibid.: 83), which means that the transitive use was regarded as the original and the intransitive use was regarded as derived, but for some verbs it was not clear which use was original (ibid.: 83). He also pointed at verb pairs like set/sit and lay/lie (ibid.: 83) that could fulfill this transitive/intransitive alternation (12a-b, 13a-b), but still, sit could also be used transitively, and set could be used in an intransitive sense (14a-b). Some transitive verbs can also be used as anticausative intransitives (ibid.: 84) to express a property of the subject by means of “well” (15a-b) or anything descriptive (16a-b). We refer to them topically as middle constructions.

(12a) He sets the baby on the floor. Transitive (12b) He sits on a bench in the park Intransitive

(13a) He lay the baby on the mattress. Transitive (13b) He lay in the grass. Intransitive

(14a) He sits the baby on the stool. Transitive (14b) The sun sets. Intransitive

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(15a) His plays won’t act and his poems won’t sell. Intransitive, intransitive (15b) None of the babies photographed well. Intransitive

(16a) This paper reads like a novel. Intransitive (16b) These words read easily. Intransitive

4. Ambi-transitive verbs

Ambi-transitive verbs have one or more transitive senses and one or more intransitive senses. O’Grady (1980:58) distinguishes “alternating intransitives” and “derived intransitives”. The first type can also be used transitively to “denote events, processes and [self-originating] changes of state” independent of an intervening agent. This is what Jespersen (1933: 82) calls verbs of motion and change. With the second type the transitive sense seems more basic as these verbs express events that need a participating agent, which is missing because the participant in the subject position is not the agent but “an agentive actualizer”: e.g. (15a-b , 16a-b) above. Keyser and Roeper (1984, 1992) call this first type ergatives and the second type middles.

5. The passive voice

In secondary school, we turned active constructions into passive constructions and vice versa using a simple technique on the basis of one conversion formula: verbtense <> betense + verbpast_participle e.g. (17a- c). We were told that we could drop the by-clause with the original subject because the object of the active voice becomes the new subject of the passive voice, replacing the old one, making the original subject optional or redundant as a result of the shift of focus. Of course there is more to it than this, but these were the basics.

(17a) I see a dog. <> A dog is seen (by me). (17b) I saw a dog. <> A dog was seen (by me). (17c) I have seen a dog. <> A dog has been seen (by me).

Jespersen (1933: 85-88) also describes the passive and observes that we use passive voice when the subject of the active voice is either unknown (18a), not easy to state (18b), uninteresting (18c) or irrelevant (18d), and so in a majority of these cases we will not mention it.

(18a) She was killed in a car accident. (18b) I was tempted to kill him. (18c) The doctor was sent for. (18d) My bike was stolen.

He links transitive active voice with intransitive passive voice and explains this as follows, with regard to examples (19a-b): “Jim is ‘governed by’ or, as it may also be termed ‘the object of’ the preposition at. [This may …] be analyzed in another way: laughed at may be called a -phrase having Jim as its object.” Thus it is clear how this active sentence can turn into a passive (Jespersen 1933: 87). Moreover, also clauses with a [transitive verb + object + preposition] can be turned into the passive: e.g. (20a-b).

(19a) Everybody laughed at Jim. Transitive, active (19b) Jim was laughed at by everybody. Intransitive, passive

(20a) I take good care of her. Transitive, active (20b) She is taken good care of. Intransitive, passive

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6. Valency and transitivity

Dixon & Aikhenvald (2000: 2) say that in every language there is a major clause type, consisting of a predicate and a variable number of arguments. In fact, two clause types are universal: the intransitive and the transitive clause. They differ in valency, a notion from chemistry coined in 1897 as a linguistic metaphor by the logician Charles Sanders Peirce8, referring to the number of arguments controlled by a predicate. I focus on predicates that are lexical verbs controlling 1, 2 or sometimes 3 arguments as in (21a-c).

# arguments aka: (21a) The door opens. 1 monovalent, monadic, intransitive (21b) She opens the door. 2 divalent, dyadic, transitive (21c) He gave her the doorknob. 3 trivalent, triadic, ditransitive

These arguments can be either core or non-core (22a-d) and verbs can be classified on the basis of the clause types they occur in (Dixon & Aikhenvald 2002: 4). They can be strictly intransitive verbs (e.g. arrive), strictly transitive verbs (e.g. like) or ambitransitive verbs in two varieties, namely S=A “agentive ambitransitives” (e.g. follow, win) or S=O “patientive ambitransitives” (e.g. open, melt) (ibid.: 6, Mithun 20009).

(22a) The door (S) opens. (S) core: subject of an (22b) She (A) opens the door (P). (A) core: agent of a transitive verb (P) core: patient of a transitive verb (22c) He is sitting (in the park) PP. (PP) non-core: oblique, optional

Valency can reduce or increase. A causative conversion is a prototypical increase (25a->b) and according to Dixon and Aikhenvald, “the basic semantic effect of a causative derivation is to introduce an additional participant, the causer, which naturally has the syntactic effect of adding an ” (Dixon and Aikhenvald 2000: 16).

(25a) The car (S) stops. active voice, intransitive, monovalent (25b) He (A) stops the car (P). active voice, transitive, divalent

On the other hand, passive voice is a prototypical reduction (ibid.: 7) (23a->b). When (23b) (A) is removed from the core and becomes an oblique, the clause becomes intransitive, since there is only one core argument left, namely the original (P) that has become (S).

(23a) I (A) open the door (P). active voice, transitive, divalent (23b) The door (S) is opened (by me). passive voice, intransitive, monovalent

Next to this prototypical passive, English also has an agentless passive (ibid.: 7) where the A is not stated, and another “valency-reducing derivation where the S of the derived verb corresponds to the underlying O, […without a…] marker (or implication of…) the underlying A” (ibid.: 7). This is an anticausative (24c), the inverse of a causative (24d) . Notice (24c), in contrast to (24a-b), comes into this state without the involvement of an A, in other words by itself or spontaneously.

(24a) The download was started (by John). Prototypical passive, optional oblique

8 As retrieved from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce on July 12 2020. 9 In Dixon & Aikhenvald 2000, p84-113 10

(24b) The download was started. Agentless passive (‘by someone’ implied) (24c) The download started. Anticausative, no A stated or implied.

(24d) John started the download. Causative, A stated.

This is how the passive behaves in English. Siewierska (1984:255) concludes a survey of different types of passives in different languages saying many “so-called passives do not have a single property in common”. In this paper, different passives appear cross-linguistically as translation equivalents for English active ergative clauses. In order to explain their appearance, I look into the formation and functions of active and passive voice in the languages of this research.

7. Transitivity and semantics

Each language has its classes of verbs. Whether, or to what extent, a verb is transitive is linked to its semantics. Hopper and Thompson (1980) thought up 10 parameters to set up a transitivity scale. They found that a syntactically transitive verb that scores somewhere near the middle of the scale often allows a valency-decreasing derivation to intransitive while a syntactically intransitive verb that scores in the middle section, often allows a valency-increasing derivation to transitive use, and so “the meaning of a subclass of verbs will often incline it towards occurring with a certain kind of valency-changing derivation” (Hopper and Thompson 1980: 20) – e.g. (26a-b). Comment: (26a) The noise annoyed me. This verb typically has a human O. (26b) I was annoyed by the noise. => Preference of Passive construction in discourse, promotion of O to the surface subject S.

There are two major classes or categories of verbs that also have likely derivations. Here I start from Anglophile linguistics, focusing on examples in English.

Unaccusative10 verbs describe an event, that happens spontaneously to a patient (27b,c) or is instigated by and agent (27a). If they are transitive, they probably also take passive (27a > 27c) and/or an anticausative derivation (27a > 27b). If they are intransitive (27b), they probably can undergo a causative derivation (27b > 27a) e.g. meanings such as ‘break’, ‘change’, ‘move’, ‘turn’, ‘burn’, ‘open’. These verbs are part of my study.

(27a) John opens the file. transitive, causative derivation from (26b) (27b) The file opens. intransitive, anticausative derivation from (26a) (27c) The file is opened (by John). passive derivation from (26a)

Unergative verbs11 denote action, either intransitive in general terms or transitive in function of a specific patient (28a-b). e.g. meanings such as ‘eat’, ‘sweep’, ‘polish’, ‘play (at)’, ‘cry (over)’, ‘speak (to)’. These verbs are not part of this study.

(28a) John reads a newspaper. transitive, specific patient (28b) John reads. intransitive, action in general terms

10 Hopper and Thompson (1980: 20) prefer ‘S=O ambitransitives’, patient-preserving or P-lability as a name for these alternating verbs. 11 Hopper and Thompson (1980: 20) prefer ‘S=A ambitransitives’ or agent-preserving or A-lability as a name for these alternating verbs. 11

I think this terminology is quite confusing, at least it was confusing to me at first. Initially it was clear, that unergative and unaccusative are classes or categories of verbs. Unergative verbs are verbs with animate agent-subjects expressing voluntary actions, events or activities (28a-b). Unaccusative verbs are verbs with non-agent subjects and these verbs express involuntary actions, events of activities, either affecting animate or non-animate subjects (27b-c). In English, unaccusative verbs often appear in an active anticausative-intransitive / active causative- transitive alternation e.g. (27b/a). They can just as well emerge in a passive causative intransitive / active causative-transitive alternation e.g. (27c/a). (27b/a) is also called an ergative alternation. (27c/a) is an active/passive syntactic conversion but in this paper there can be more to it if there is no by-clause. Let us visualize this:

Table 2 - Unaccusative verbs and alternations unaccusative or ‘ergative’ verbs Alternation: clause 1 clause 2 basic alternation intransitive transitive + also anticausative causative + also active active + not passive passive

It is crucial to notice that “ergative” in this table refers to lexical ergativity in accusative languages (like the ones of this research) as opposed to morpho-syntactic ergativity in ergative languages. This could be a source of confusion since unaccusative and ergative verbs exist in both types of languages but the implementations are different. If functional linguists, e.g. Halliday, Davidse, Taverniers say “ergative” they think “lexical ergativity”, if formal linguistic typologists e.g. Dixon, Dryer say “ergative” they think “morpho-syntactic ergativity”.

8. Cross-linguistic comparison of default forms of verbs in active and passive voice

Often examples of ergative alternations in grammars, papers and dissertations are given in simple present, sometimes in simple past and seldom in present perfect. This does make sense considering that, according to the data12 of Ginseng English Online School on the basis of Krámský’s (1969: 118) verb form frequency research, 57% of all verbs in the corpus of his analysis, composed of spoken language, were in the simple present, compared to only 19.7% in the simple past, 8.7% in the simple future and 6% in the present perfect, all other tenses appearing less than 1.5%. Additionally, in academic and technical texts as much as 62.8% were in the simple present. However, only taking simple present into consideration could lead to missing out on important aspects in the use of ergative strategies as the implementations of aspect and tense differ in each language and thus translation equivalents may differ not only in lexis, but also in grammar. Therefore I will start my research with both simple present and present perfect tenses in English datasets and add other tenses and aspects in my comparison when they emerge in the translation in the other languages. To anticipate possible consequences, I continue now with a brief look at the verbs open and begin used in active agentive, active intransitive and passive forms and corresponding adjectival/adverbial derivations in all five languages.

12 As retrieved from https://ginsengenglish.com/blog/english-verb-tense-frequency on July 11 2020. 12

Table 3 displays 3rd person singular translation equivalents for open and begin, comparing agentive (incomplete13) clauses consisting of subject and verb in simple present, simple past and present perfect tenses.

Table 3 - Comparison of agentive S + V English German French Dutch Danish 3rd person sing. he/she er /sie il/elle hij/zij han/hun simple present opens öffnet ouvre opent åbner begins beginnt commence begint begynder simple past opened öffnete a ouvert opende åbnede began begann a commencé begon begyndte present perfect has opened hat geöffnet a ouvert heeft geopend har åbnet has begun hat begonnen a commencé is begonnen er begyndt

French apparently prefers a perfect tense as an equivalent for English simple past since this tense is more frequently used in translations according to Google Translate. Cross-linguistically two different auxiliaries are used in the present perfect , namely equivalents of ‘have’ and equivalents of ‘be’. I deal with this in my research.

Table 4 compares intransitive clauses with ‘the door’ and ‘the process’ as mediums being chosen because they are, according to the collocate option of Sketch Engine as applied to the enTenTen15 corpus, among the most frequently used subject-collocates, the former with open, the latter with begin.

Table 4 - Comparison of intransitive S + V English German French Dutch Danish 3rd person the door die Tür la porte de deur døren sing. the process der Prozess le processus het proces processen simple present opens geht auf s’ouvre gaat open åbnes begins beginnt commence begint begynder simple past opened öffnete sich s’ouvrit ging open gik op began begann a commencé begon begyndte present perfect has opened hat sich geöffnet s’est ouverte is opengegaan er åbnet has begun hat begonnen a commencé is begonnen er begyndt

More strategies can be observed in the intransitives: use of reflexive in French and German, periphrastic verbs in German, Dutch and Danish, labile verbs in all languages, Danish -s passive.

In Table 5 the formation of passive voice is compared cross-linguistically using the same subject/medium + verb combination as in table 3 in the same tenses. The default translations using MT show quite some variation in the use of passive auxiliaries, yet all passives are built the same way, namely passive auxiliary in appropriate tense + past participle, with the exception of Danish s- passive in simple present passive that can appear as an alternative for the more general be + past participle construction.

13 For now I am only interested in subject-verb formation. 13

Table 5 - Comparison of passive voice S + V English German French Dutch Danish 3rd person the door die Tür la porte de deur døren sing. the process der Prozess le processus het proces processen simple is opened wird geöffnet est ouverte wordt geopend åbnes present is begun wird gestartet est commencé is begonnen er startet simple past was opened wurde geöffnet a été ouvert ging open blev åbnet was begun wurde begonnen a commencé was begonnen blev startet present has been opened wurde geöffnet a été ouvert is geopend er åbnet perfect has been begun wurde begonnen a commencé is begonnen er startet

Ergative readings are possible as pointed out by Abraham (2000, 2003). If no agent is expressed nor implied, passives can be read as active tense, especially if the [auxiliary be + past participle]- implementation is the same in both voices. This is especially the case with verbs with reflexive force (Curme 1931) and verbs that have “inclinees”14 as their subject (Davidse 2011).

Additionally [be + adjective/adverb] can also identify as an alternative ergative strategy in all languages. Such intransitives express a resultative state. Table 6 offers an example of this use, plus an example of an [Adj + N] construction, which also refers to the same state, but now expressed by an adjective in a noun phrase configuration.

Table 6 - Comparison of be + adjective / adjective + N English German French Dutch Danish 3rd person sing. the door die Tür la porte de deur døren the war der Krieg la guerre de oorlog krigen simple present is open ist offen est ouverte is open er åben is over ist vorbei est finie is voorbij er forbi Adj + N een open deur eine offene Tür une porte ouverte een open deur en åben dør

Dixon & Aikhenvald (2000: 19) plea to first observe semantics and syntactic differences and relations in a context, as used, in order to see how they “interrelate and function” and only after that try to formulate how these contrasts are realized. This approach will be part of the final part of my methodology, where I go back to the verbs in the datasets in order to observe their actual functioning and to further examine their possibilities and restrictions.

9. The role of aspect

Not discussed so far is the role of aspect, which cannot be underestimated as each tense of each , either referring to past, present or future time, also includes an element of aspect. Aspect refers to the internal temporal structure of states, events and processes as expressed by lexical verbs, verbal phrases or constructions and as such distinguishes the way we look at them. (Comrie 1976:3ff, after Holt 1943:6; Bybee 2003:157). As commonly known, each language has its own means of coding aspect, which have been researched, analyzed and subclassified by many linguists. Because an in-depth analysis of aspect or tense is not the focus of this research, I treat this in a simple, pragmatic and comparative way, in order to explain the initial choices of tense and aspect made in this research.

14 “Inclinees” refers to a semantic role in certain types of verbs that makes them ergative candidates. (Davidse 2011 – as discussed further on in paragraph 16 of this section. 14

In the next paragraph, I introduce the following abbreviations related to aspect: (S) for single block of time, (C) for continuous aspect, (HR) for habitual or repeated actions, (CP) for completed, perfective situations, (P) for continuous actions over a period of time. Additionally I use the following abbreviations related to tense: (PR) for present, (PA) for past, (E) for eternal, timeless. The arrow <- indicates precedence and -> refers to result.

English distinguishes four aspects15: simple, progressive, perfect, and perfect progressive, each of them expressing an aspect of duration or flow of time of a state, event or process that takes place in a single block of time (S), continuously (C) or repeatedly (HR) (ibid. 11). While the simple aspect describes facts or a general action, one that is neither continuous nor completed (CP), it is usually used to describe something that takes place habitually (HR). As opposed to the simple form, the progressive form expresses continuous actions that happen over a period of time (P) and almost always involves the auxiliary be followed by the present participle of the lexical verb. As to be expected, a perfect progressive form is a combination of the perfect and progressive aspects. Perfect progressive refers to the “completed portion of an ongoing action”(ibid. 11) (CP) and is built by joining a perfective form of be (have been) with a present participle.

The following table classifies and exemplifies tense and aspect in the present and past tenses.

Table 7 – Tense and aspect, examples and main T(ense)- and A(spect)-Use Example16 Tense Main T-Use Aspect Main A-Use I wash the car. present (PR) and/or (E) simple (HR) or (S) I am washing the car. (PR) progressive (C) I have washed the car (PA) -> (PR) perfect (CP) I have been washing the car. (PA) -> (PR) perfect progressive (C)(P) I washed the car. past (PA) simple (S) I was washing the car. (PA) progressive (C) I had washed the car. (PA2)<- (PA1) perfect (CP) I had been washing the car. (PA2)<- (PA1) perfect progressive (C)(P)(CP) Highlighted: initial choice of tense and aspect in the English source data of this research.

10. Ergative, middle and passive constructions

All three have been mentioned in the previous paragraphs. What do ergative, middle and passive constructions have in common? What makes them different?

First of all, the subject in all three is not an agent. In the passive construction, the transitive agent may be retained, but this is not the case in the other constructions: compare (29a.1), (29b.1) and (29c.1). In a middle construction, a property or a characteristic of the verb is expressed, the construction is intransitive and does not have a transitive counterpart: compare (29b) and (29b.2). In the ergative construction, a transitive/intransitive alternation is possible, and the non-agentive subject of the intransitive clause can be moved to the object position in the transitive counterpart: compare (29c) and (29c.2).

15 As retrieved from https://www.lawlessenglish.com/learn-english/grammar/tense-aspect/ on July 11 2020 16 As retrieved from https://www.lawlessenglish.com/learn-english/grammar/tense-aspect/ on July 11 2020 15

1. by clause: agent 2. alternative clause

(29a) The man was eaten. 1. The man was eaten by a crocodile. passive 2. The crocodile ate the man. active

(29b) The car drives easily. 1. *The car drives easily by the man. middle 2. *The man drives easily the car. no transitive counterpart

(29c) The cake burned. 1. *The cake burned by the cook. ergative 2. The cook burned the cake. transitive counterpart

Yang (1994: 77-78) points out there is also a syntactic difference concerning prepositional objects. A prepositional object in an active construction (30a) can become the subject in the passive counterpart (30b), with the original agent retained, providing there is no direct object (30c). In middle constructions there is no such restriction. The original prepositional subject can become subject and the direct object can be retained (30d).

(30a) John has cut with the knife. active (30b) The knife has been cut with by John. passive (30c) *The knife has been cut bread with by John passive (30d) This knife cuts bread easily. middle Yang (1994: 77-78) also points at 4 semantic differences between these 3 constructions:

1. Passive constructions focus on the active object but the relationship between the participants and the verb does not change whereas ergative and middle constructions do change this relationship (31a-c). Properly in (31a) still refers to the unmentioned agent and not the current subject. In (31b) and (31c) fast enough and easily refer to properties of the theme subject. Middles and passives resemble each other as in both cases there is an agent, either stated or implied while in ergative intransitives there is no agent at all.

(31a) The floor wasn’t swept properly. passive (31b) The floor didn’t dry fast enough. ergative (31c) This floor doesn’t sweep easily. middle

2. Ergative constructions generally can be paraphrased causatively and middles cannot (32a-b). In (32b) opens easily is a property of the door. It is not caused by John.

(32a) If the door opens, that’s because John opens it: John causes the door to open.

(32b) If this door opens easily, that’s because *John opens it easily: *John causes the door to open easily.

3. Some ergative constructions cannot be paraphrased causatively as they do not have a causer. They do it “all by themselves” (33). Keyser and Roeper (1984: 405) argue “all by itself” means “totally without external aid” and that would qualify as ergative or without agent.

(33) The boat sank all by itself.

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4. A final difference between ergatives and middles is the use of adverbials: they are mandatory in middles and optional in ergatives (34a-d). Middles always characterize the activity while ergatives primarily report events and can optionally include how the event is performed.

(34a) The floor dried (quickly). ergative, adverb optional (34b) The door opens (easily). ergative, adverb optional (34c) Wooden floors sweep easily. middle, adverb required (34d) This type of door opens easily. middle, adverb required

11. Ergativity

According to Dixon (1994: 3) the term ergativity has been in use “at least since the late 1920s”. Ramer (1994: 1-2) traces the term back to notes of the anthropological scholars Haddon and Ray in 1893. They use it for a locative case as spoken in languages in British New Guinea (now a part of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea). It is first used in its modern sense in (or possibly) before 1902 by a “Pater Schmidt” referring to Haddon and Ray (1983), but according to Butt (2012: 198) Schmidt misinterpreted the term and assigned it to the agentive nominative subject case, thus coining the word. Trombetti (190317) used it like that too and attributed the term to Pater Schmidt. Ultimately, Ray (190718) accepted this use and dropped the term.

The concept of ergativity has been defined and discussed by many authors. Anderson (1968), Lyons (1968) and Fillmore (1968) all used the term for the link between the subject of an intransitive sentence and the object of a transitive sentence. Plank (1979: 4) summarizes the basic idea, saying “ergative alignment identifies intransitive subjects and transitive direct objects, as opposed to transitive subjects”. Dixon (1979, 1994: 3) mainly deals with morphological ergativity in ergative- absolutive languages. In these languages the subject of the transitive clause (=A) appears in the marked ergative case and both the subject of the intransitive clause (=S) and the object of the transitive clause (=0) occur in the unmarked absolutive.

All the languages I work with in this paper are accusative languages. Ergativity in this context is different since these languages can show ergative without ergative morphology. This is the case for English, German, French, Dutch and Danish and the initial examples in the introduction already showed this. This is a broader, lexical-semantic interpretation of the concept of ergativity. Dixon (1994: 20), for fear of a degradation of the term, argues against the use of the term ergativity for this purpose as thus every language has a causative construction.

This did not keep authors in different frameworks to use the term in this broader, lexical-semantic sense, as a shorter way to refer to this “lexical-semantic ergativity”. Besides, verbs allowing for an “ergative alternation” are termed “ergative verbs” while in English these verbs are often called “labile verbs” (Davidse 1992, Haspelmath 1993, Dixon 1994, McMillion 2006, McGregor 2009). This is more specific though, because labile verbs do not change their form in the ergative alternation as the same verb is used in both clauses. Others have suggested other names and it is important to include this here too, in order to avoid ambiguities and misunderstandings. There is a link between the presence or absence of ergativity, transitivity and causativity. In a previous section I elaborated on this. Now I will put things together in a lexical-semantic context.

17 Trombetti, Alfredo 1902−1903 Delle relazioni delle lingue caucasiche con le lingue camitosemitiche e con altri gruppi. Giornale della Società Asiatica Italiana. Firenze. 18 Ray, Sidney. 1907. Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Terres Straits. Vol. III:Linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 17

Haspelmath (1993: 90) studies verb pairs cross-linguistically and semantically in alternating clauses. The verbs in his selection are clearly “change of state” verbs. Each of his 31 verb pairs are analyzed in alternating clauses in 21 languages. One clause is always transitive with a verb with a causative meaning and a causing agent, the other clause is intransitive with the situation occurring spontaneously and without causing agent. He names this alternation “inchoative/causative”. The inchoative clause and the passive of the causative clause have about the same meaning, but in the first no agent is involved, while in the second, the agent is at least implied (or could be mentioned in a by-clause).

Haspelmath (1993) discusses the typological side of the fore mentioned alternation and distinguishes three main types of inchoative/causative alternations or oppositions: causative, anticausative and non-directed. The non-directed alternations are further subdivided into labile, equipollent and suppletive (Haspelmath 1993: 91-92). The next table, inspired by his definitions, visualizes the characteristics and the differences:

Table 8 – Verbs in clause alternations according to Haspelmath (1993: 91-92) clause verb 1 verb 2 means of derivation alternation causative inchoative/anticausative is basic causative derived affix, auxiliary, stem modification anticausative causative is basic anticausative derived equipollent stem + derivation 1 stem + derivation 2 different affix, auxiliary, stem suppletive root 1 root 2 different root labile same verb none

When causatively alternating verbs are used intransitively, they are referred to as anti- causatives or inchoatives because the intransitive variant describes a situation in which the theme participant (for instance ‘the door’ in the door opened) undergoes a change of state, becoming, for example, “opened” (Schäfer 2009: 642) .

Summarized, the ergative or anti-causative/causative alternation is all about specific intransitive/transitive alternating clauses where the subject of the intransitive clause can become the object of a transitive clause and vice versa, both clauses describing the same event with different syntax but in the same semantic context. The main difference is that the transitive clause mentions the agent or force that instigates the event or action that has an effect on the object, referred to as “medium” in Systemic Functional Linguistics. In the intransitive clause this subject/medium is undergoer or patient (see 35a) who executes the event seemingly spontaneously without mention or implication of an agent/instigator (35b). A passive construction can be an alternative for this intransitive active clause, but it differs in that it implies an agent, understood, or mentioned in an optional phrase, by default (35c). This option is not available in the intransitive active variant (35d).

(35a) He opens the door. (35b) The door opens. (35c) The door is opened (by him). (35d) *The door opens by him.

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12. Ergativity cross-linguistically in German, French, Dutch and Danish

Although I consider not only English lexical-semantic ergative alternations, but also the German, French, Dutch and Danish equivalents, the main access to this study will be English. Not only much more has been written in and about English about this topic than in any other language, English also takes a special position in the discussion of lexical-semantic ergativity, with the presence of a large number of ergative (“labile”) verbs, able to express the alternation without changing their external form. Other languages can do this too, to a certain extent, but not as frequently as English, since they often use other strategies. This will be what this study will clearly show.

I include a strategy that resembles passivization. That is disputable as passives imply an agent and that goes against the definition of lexical ergativity which is supposed to be agentless. But what if no agent is mentioned and semantically there is no need because the agent would not just be irrelevant, but moreover could be regarded as a superfluous and artificial construct? What if this is not a passive at all, but a syncretism that also can be read as be + predicate adjective? This is not an undocumented feature.

Werner Abraham (2003: 5) looks at passivization in German and sees two passives with two auxiliaries: an “event passive” with werden and a “resultative passive” with sein (36a-b). In English there is only one passive auxiliary: be.

(36a) Der Wagen wird geschoben. the car is in the process of being pushed ~ The car is pushed (and you see the action in progress and you see the agent)

(36b) Der Wagen ist eingeschoben. the car is pushed in ~ The car has been pushed (and you see the result and no trace of an agent)

In Abraham’s reasoning, this last clause in German combines a number of properties that lead to the concept of lexical ergativity.

The collocation between sein (=E be) and the past participle merges active and passive into a nominalization with a nominalized attributive adjective, neutralizing the diatheses of active and passive. This is a syncretism because it can be read two ways and to be ergative, you have to read the participle as an active ergative. Abraham thinks this is possible “since past of perfectives are states, generally and without exception. … therefore they are closely akin to [and as such they] cannot be bearers of agent arguments.” Abraham (2003: 6)

If they are not agentive, they comply with the definition of lexical ergativity. The fact that adjectives always select sein/be makes this a default and acceptable selection. Moreover, because adjectives express properties or states, they are neither passive nor active, ergo they are voice-neutral and as adjectives cannot be agents, they comply with unaccusativity too. (ibid.: 7)

Abraham (2003: 1) excludes English examples from his paper. He is critical of the on-going discussions on verbal ergativity in English (Keyser and Roeper 1984, Levin and Rappaport 1995). As digital media evolve, in the process being very productive in creating new ergative alternations, it might be interesting to reopen the discussion using new English examples e.g. (37a-f).

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(37a) I download a file. active, simple present, transitive, causative

(37b) The file downloads. active, simple present, intransitive, anticausative

(37c) The file has downloaded. active, present perfect intransitive, anticausative

(37d) The file was downloaded. be + nominalized attributive adjective reading?

On many browsers, this shortcut opens your Downloads interface. You can see downloads that have completed, and any downloads that are still in progress. If you double-click a file in the list, it opens or runs. You can also click a button to open the folder on your computer where the file was downloaded.19

In the example pictured here, a downloaded file is shown…6

(37e) To find the file, that is downloaded, …

Finding a file on your computer that is downloaded using an Internet browser.20

(37f) The file has been downloaded. perfective be + nominalized attributive adjective reading?

Can we treat downloaded as an adjective? Seemingly we can. Of course (2b-c) are preferable, but (37d-f) might be regarded as valid ergative clauses on the rise. To add to this argument, I include forms of ‘open’ as they appear in my cross-language research. It is up to the reader to decide if this is a valid argument in favor of alternative readings.

13. Summary of popular concurrent forms of ‘open’ (V/adj) per language

Excluded are all passive auxiliaries and auxiliary verbs that express causation or progress of event e.g. become in English, werden in German, worden in Dutch and blev in Danish. Only forms that are or can be read “actively” are candidates to function in an ergative alternation. e1 - English Reading (A=active, P=passive) – A/P = syncretism

(42a) The door is (open / opened). (A, A/P) (43b) The door (is / was / has / has been) opened. (A/P, A/P, A, A/P) e2 – German

(42a) Die Tür ist (offen / geöffnet) (A, A/P) (43b) Die Tür (ist / war / hat sich / wird / wurde) geöffnet. (A/P, A/P, A, P, P) e3 – French

(43a) La porte ( est / s’est) ouverte. (A/P, A) (43b) La porte (a été) ouvert. (A/P) e4 – Dutch

(44a) De deur is (open / geopend / opengegaan) (A,A/P,A/P) (44b) De deur (is / wordt) geopend. (A/P, P)

19 Retrieved from https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001533.htm#ctrl-j on July 4 2020. 20 Retrieved from https://www.computerhope.com/issues on July 4 2020. 20 e5 – Danish

(45a) Døren er (åben / åbnet) (A, A/P) (45b) Døren (er / blev ) åbnet. (A/P, P)

Notice ‘the door has opened’ always reads actively. English is the only language that consistently uses ‘have’ as a present perfect auxiliary. German, French, Dutch and Danish, dependent on the verb and the aspect expressed, can either use ‘have’ or ‘be’ in a present perfect. Possible aspects in this context are in-progress, perfective (action has come to an end), and resultative (completion, completed state). All this has to be taken into account when observing, analyzing and interpreting the raw translation data in my research. Bias by frequency of use by native and non-native speakers cannot be excluded from this cross-linguistic environment, but will be dealt with while proceeding.

14. Other cross-linguistic approaches

Letuchiy (2009: 240) includes the passive in his analysis of cross-linguistic properties of labile verbs. He classifies labile verbs in a number of subtypes – “anticausative, reciprocal, reflexive, converse and passive – most of which correspond to morphologically marked valency derivations. This classification leads to a revised definition of lability: a is a verb with two uses, which differ in syntactic transitivity and in the semantic role of the subject”. (Letuchiy 2009: 240)

Creissels’ (2014: 913-914) view is based on Dixon (1994). His argument structure preserving ambitransitivity or “weak” ambitransitivity corresponds with A-lability and his argument structure modifying ambitransitivity or “strong” ambitransitivity corresponds with P-lability. Creissels also distinguishes two types of P-lability: (anti)causative lability vs. active / passive lability, but only with an unexpressed and unimplied agent in the intransitive clause.

To the best of my knowledge there has not been much comparative lexical ergative research including both Danish and one or more of the languages in my selection. Grammatical comparisons between Scandinavian languages are abundant though and since these languages are so closely related, I have read a few of these studies in order to obtain some insight into these comparative grammars as a background for the interpretation of the results in relation to Danish. English and/or German and/or French and/or Dutch have been researched with a comparative lexical ergative focus in recent years. Here follows a concise and probably incomplete overview of the status quaestionis.

Werner Abraham (2003: 1) refers to his work (Abraham 1993, 1995) and Haider’s (1984) suggesting that ergativity is similar in Dutch as compared to German and on the basis of Haspelmath (1993) we know that English, German and French are partially similar and partially different in their strategies. We copied the data from Haspelmath (1993: 101) that are relevant for this thesis from his table 3 – expression types by language: A, C, E, L and S are the 5 types of alternations distinguished in this paper.

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Table 9 – Strategies in German, French and English according to Haspelmath (1993: 101)

A C E L S A = anticausative

German 14.5 0 4 11.5 1 C = causative

French 20.5 2 0 7.5 1 E = equipollent

English 3.5 0 1 25 3 L = labile

S = suppletive

According to Haspelmath’s data all three languages show labile and anticausative alternations. The English ergative strategy is mainly labile. German has more anticausative than labile alternations. This is the same for French, that has even more anticausative alternations and less labile alternations than German. Conversely, no causative alternations appear in German and English. French has a limited number of causative alternations, but no equipollent strategy is observed in French. Additionally, all three languages have some suppletive activity and German and English have equipollent instances (ibid.: 102).

There have been a number of dissertations at this university with a focus on lexical ergativity, often in a comparative perspective and including Dutch.

Evi De Groote (2013), who compares 41 English deadjectival ergative verbs and their translation equivalents in Dutch and German, observes several parallels and differences. According to her research, English ergative verbs correspond with 5 different strategies in Dutch and German: prefixed verbs, deadjectival verbs, ergative verbs, reflexive verbs and an attributive construction. In her research she encounters a substantial number of periphrastic constructions in Dutch and German. As for the deadjectival verbs in this work, they will not show up in my research, since they are neither among the most frequently used verbs nor in English, nor in the other languages. According to the enTenTen15 web corpus strengthen (#318) and deepen (#881) are the first two in the frequency list.

Joren Somers (2013) studies 29 English mainly start/stop verbs and German translation equivalents and distinguishes in German (1) ergative verbs, (2) reflexive verbs, (3) verbs with preverbal elements (which encompassed both prefix and particle verbs), (4) passives, (5) function verb phrases, (6) verbs with a prepositional complement, (7) syntactic causatives and (8) remaining. In his German sample labile verbs, passives, causatives and prepositional verbs do not occur frequently, but verbs with preverbal elements appear often.

Joyce Stroobant (2013) compares English and Spanish and confirms that anticausative in Spanish is often marked by the reflexive se while such a strategy is non-existent in English. In my research reflexive clitics in anticausatives are typical for French and German but are used to a lesser extent in Danish and Dutch.

Sam Beke (2014) focuses on labile verbs in Dutch and has a list of close to 300 verbs of which a substantial number are prefixed. He also notices a productive suffix -iseren, which corresponds with English -ify and observes labile verbs in Dutch too, but not as many as in English. His corpus-based research is mainly diachronic. An interesting outcome in his work is that every productive ergative strategy investigated shows a steady and comparable rise of the number of verbs since the 12th century. The two main clusters of verbs in his study have a change and move meaning, which is consistent with the English data since Jespersen’s (1927, 1933) observations.

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Anke Huybrechts (2016) compares English and Swedish focused on pattern frequencies and investigates both transitive vs. intransitive and passive vs. active constructions, thus providing an impression of English labile strategy vs. Swedish strategies. Many passive constructions without an expressed agent are observed in Swedish. Other strategies in Swedish include labile alternations and both reflexive sig markers and a passive -s marker allowing transitive verbs to “ergativize”. She shows that suppletive alternation is also a prominent strategy in Swedish. I expect quite some parallels between her observations in Swedish and my observations in Danish, as these two languages are closely related.

Marthe Lemeire (2018) compares ergative relational verbs in English and Dutch. She discovers non- verbal alternatives and verbs with different strategies in Dutch, but few labile verbs. As for relational verbs, they do not make my selection, because there are no relational verbs up high enough in the cross-linguistic data of my research.

15. To alternate or not?

Much has been said about alternations already. According to Goldberg (2002: 329) I should not be studying them because it limits the development of a generalizing theory, the ultimate goal, leading to the deeper understanding of universal language. She believes in empirical studies but matching, observing and analyzing data cross-linguistically in pursue of new insights does not get her approval. (ibid.: 349)

Davidse (2011: 2) comes to my rescue, citing Gleason (1966: 195), who argues that because language is not only composed of syntagmatic structures, but also involves paradigmatic relations between those structures, therefore both must be described. Gleason (1966: 199) introduces the terms agnation and enation. Agnation refers to systematic grammatical variation between instances that are lexically identical (38a-b). Enation refers to identical grammatical structures with different lexical items (39a-b). Gleason (2011: 203) adds examples of partially enate agnates and structures that seem enate but are not, but he does not follow the crumbs to track this back to an explanation, while functional linguists would try to figure out the system behind such instances.

(38a) I write this novel. (38b) This novel is written by me.

(39a) The writer eats an apple. (39b) The poet drinks a beer.

Davidse (2011: 4) also brings up Schøsler (2011) and Van den Eynde (1995). She cites Schøsler who promotes Van den Eynde’s view of grammar as being “organized in closed sets of alternations, …paradigms, which are language specific packages of expression and content”. (ibid.: 4) She argues Van den Eynde’s “distinction … between verb-specific and verb-general alternations is crucial “ because “… all clauses allow for paradigmatic variants which are not dependent on the lexical verb used in them … like for instance the formation of “basic clause types (…declarative, interrogative, imperative)” and “theme/information variants (e.g. variation of the linear modification order)” but “ …other clausal variants are dependent on the lexical verb and are … much less regular.” (ibid.: 4)

Also Levin (1993: 1) recommends these verb-specific alternations should be scrutinized to uncover the role of the aspects of verb meaning, because only such a methodology can lead to a linguistically based classification of lexical verbs. This does not conflict with the broader generalizations Goldberg has in mind: Halliday (1968, 1985), Green (1974), Levin (1993), Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995),

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Van den Eynde (1995) , Davidse (2011), the Collins Cobuild corpus (1996-2020 and continuing) and many other functional linguists provide insights in sub- and cross-relations of verb clusters on the basis of semantic properties and this ultimately allows for well-founded generalizations.

16. To alternate

Davidse (2011: 12) focuses once more on the English ergative alternation. Returning to Jespersen (1927: 336) who rolled the dice noticing that “the stone rolls” does not differ a lot semantically from “the stone is rolled” except for the former having an internal causation (it just started rolling) versus the latter (in my imagination) being pushed off the slope by some kids, they thus being the external cause, causers or causation. These particular intransitives, expressing change or move, definitely have a “passive flavor”. English developed a lot more of them and not just change or move verbs. Just look at the 1367 records with ergative verbs in my eCorpora database, or muse on the examples above (37a-f). The reasons for this expansion can be attributed to Curme (1931), Halliday (1967, 1968), Hopper and Thompson (1980), Pedersen (1991) Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995), Olivier (2000), Davidse (2002), McMillion (2006), the continuous updates in the Collins Cobuild Corpus and the records of the online linguistic community.

Over time, clusters of ergative verbs have been added including the “Intransitives with reflexive force” (Curme 1931: 438f), and while English uses labile verbs, German and French insert reflexive clitics in those intransitives (ibid.: 440f).

Davidse (2011: 16) adds “inclinees” as some kind of semantic role that makes that mediums are inclined to get involved in actions or events that fit their role or purpose because they have a predisposition towards ”instigatable motion, …related to their shape or … properties …: wheels turn, doors open, barrels roll, logs float etc.” (ibid.: 16) …files download, programs run, games start up, operating systems update, networks connect, streams stream, content webcasts, computers crash. Modern media have been fairly productive in this matter.

“Another class of typical subjects of ergative intransitives is [the class] of fragile objects in relation to the typical mishaps that may befall them: glass chips, paint fades, skin flakes etc.” (ibid.: 16) Similar are weather, economic – social - linguistic phenomena and health issues: ice melts, taxes increase, people meet, words change and covid19 spreads. Davidse (ibid.: 16) also adds objects that, if treated right, perform “predicted” or “desired behavior” e.g. water boils, popcorn pops, weapons fire, cars accelerate, slow down and stop. She tells us not to forget “entities [which] may for rhetorical or ideological purposes be construed as naturally inclined to certain processes to downplay the responsibility of controlling humans in these events” (ibid.: 16). The following examples fit this description (40a-c).

(40a) The amount of fake news increases at the rate the internet expands. (40b) Houses burn down because of global warming. (40c) Diseases spread parallel with extraterrestrials invading the earth.

After 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the two Germanys unified. According to Davidse‘s (2011: 17) research, Collins Cobuild English Dictionary treated the verb unify in the 1987 edition only as a transitive verb. In the 1995 edition an ergative subsense is introduced with a number of examples referring to the unification of Germany. Davidse (ibid.: 17) concludes “the intransitive use creates an ideologically convenient vagueness”. This type of -ify verb has become very productive and it is easy to think up new verbs, e.g. I could refer to this dissertation as godtsified, meaning

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“written in a specific informal style”21. The paper godtsifies presents this process as internally caused, as if the paper behaves like a virus. In fact there is an underlying reflexive or passive meaning: the paper godtsifies itself, the paper is godtsified by God knows who…

Davidse (2011: 17) refers to Levin and Rappaport’s (1995: 82) and Olivier’s (2000: 43-44) observations of the verb break: sometimes an external instigator is easy to imagine, then again – in another context, an external instigator seems awkward (41a-b).

(41a) My leg breaks. I can imagine a lot of external causes. (41b) After a few seconds, the soap bubble broke. That is what soap bubbles do…

Davidse (2011: 18) concludes her recommending “renewed study of alternations both on the theoretical and the descriptive level”. I am in for the “descriptive approach … on the basis of corpus data”, so eventually, the focus of this study is on alternating clauses where the subject of the intransitive clause can also be the object of the transitive clause. The verb in both clauses can be the same, but it can also be different. If it is different it must mean the same in the same way we agree on semantic equivalence when matching translation equivalents across languages. Tense and voice of the verb may seemingly change in the alternation as long as we do not provide a full and restrictive context. The sum of these features I consider to be lexical ergative strategies on behalf of the meaning(s) of the verb(s) in the alternation. This is a broad definition, but to work cross- linguistically I need this scope.

21 Of course I am referring to the original ‘not-so-academic’ style of the first draft of this dissertation. 25

Part 2 - Data Collection Section 2.1 – Methodology

In order to get a representative and cross-linguistic set of verb meanings with ergative potential opportune for a comparative study of verbs in search of ergative strategies, I use a corpora-based matching methodology. Starting from an extensive list of English verbs on the one hand and frequency lists of verbs on the other hand, I search for those verb meanings, that are used most frequently cross-linguistically by selecting and matching all translation equivalents involved by means of MS-Access queries on the selected data. This way, I am able to build a cross-linguistic ranking of verbs serving as candidates able to express specific verbal meanings. On the basis of this ranking I make my selection of verbs to be analyzed and compared in the languages of my research.

1. Introduction : corpora used

How to obtain a prototypical selection of frequently used verbs appearing cross-linguistically in anticausative / causative alternations in the languages of this study? To find the answer to this question, a number of problems have to be solved : 1. Introduction : corpora used 2. Establish a ranking of frequently used verbs in English. 3. Establish a ranking of frequently used verbs in German, French, Dutch and Danish. 4. Make the data on ergative verbs in English available. 5. Match the main English ergative verbs with their translation equivalents in German, French, Dutch and Danish. 6. Establish a cross-linguistic ranking of these verbs. 7. Make a selection for analysis.

My work is corpus-based. For each language I use the largest mixed22 corpora available to date through Sketch Engine, which is “a corpus manager and text analysis software developed by Lexical Computing Limited since 2003 to enable people studying language to search large text collections according to complex and linguistically motivated queries.” Sketch Engine “includes the TenTen Corpus Family, a multilingual set of comparable web corpora, built using technology specialized in collecting only linguistically valuable web content.” 23

The next table gives an overview of the corpora used.

22 Spoken and written language 23 Information provided by Wikipedia ‘Sketch Engine’ and the Sketch Engine homepage as retrieved on May 31 2020. 26

Table 10 -- Corpora used in this study CORPORA TenTen Web-corpus Parallel Corpus 2

English Web 2015 Opus 2 OANC BNC (15+ billion words) (1+ billion words) (3+ million words) (96+ million words)

German Web 2016 Opus 2 (16+ billion words) (125+ million words)

French Web 2017 Opus 2 (5+ billion words) (766+ million words)

Dutch Web 2014 Open 2 (2+ billion words) (356+ million words)

Danish Web 2017 Opus 2 (2+ billion words) (120+ million words)

2. Establish a ranking of frequently used verbs in English.

Corpora used for English: 1 English Web 2015 (enTenTen15) : Corpus of the English Web made up of texts collected from the Internet. 2 English corpus of OPUS2 (open source parallel corpus) including as main sub corpus OpenSubTitles 2011, a corpus of movie subtitles hence basically a corpus of spoken language. 3 Open American National corpus, a spoken language corpus. 4 British National Corpus 2014, a spoken language corpus.

These English data are the gateway to the data in the other languages. To make sure that the frequency of use of verbs in both spoken and written English is well represented I use these four corpora because they are extensive, broad, varied and representative for in general. Despite the difference in size of the corpora, I give them the same weight when I calculate rankings and scores in order to avoid that the internet data would become dominant.

Using the Sketch Engine interface, I compiled a list of verbs for each corpus, sorted by frequency. These data were pasted into an MS Excel Worksheet ECorpora and data were merged in one column. Next, this column was imported as the table EVerbs into an MS Access Database ECorpora for further processing. This results in the table VerbRanksE containing a sorted list of frequently used verbs in English.

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3. Establish a ranking of frequently used verbs in German, French, Dutch and Danish.

Corpora used for German: 1 German Web 2016 (deTenTen16) : Corpus of the German Web 2 German corpus of OPUS2 (open source parallel corpus) Corpora used for French: 1 French Web 2017 (frTenTen17) : Corpus of the French Web 2 French corpus of OPUS2 (open source parallel corpus) Corpora used for Dutch: 1 Dutch Web 2014 (nlTenTen14) : Corpus of the Dutch Web 2 Dutch corpus of OPUS2 (open source parallel corpus) Corpora used for Danish: 1 Danish Web 2017 (daTenTen17) : Corpus of the Danish Web 2 Danish corpus of OPUS2 2011 (open source parallel corpus) deTenTen16, frTenTen17, nlTenTen14 and daTenTen17 are marked up corpora consisting of texts collected from the Internet. In each OPUS2 corpus the main corpus is OpenSubTitles2 consisting of subtitles of movies and series, that can be considered as a corpus of spoken language.

Using the Sketch Engine interface, I compiled a list of verbs for each corpus and each language, sorted by frequency. Next, these data were pasted into an MS Excel Worksheet ECorpora and data per language were merged in one column per language. After that, these columns were imported as tables GVerbs, FVerbs, NVerbs and DVerbs into the MS Access Database ECorpora for further processing24. This results in the tables VerbRanksG, VerbRanksF, VerbRanksN and VerbRanksD containing sorted lists of frequently used verbs in German, French, Dutch and Danish.

4. Make the data on ergative verbs in English available.

According to McMillion (2006) ergative or labile verbs are the main ergative strategy in English. The data on English labile verbs used in this research are compiled by merging McMillion’s (2006) list in the appendix of his doctorate’s thesis with the Collins’s data (2020)25 and adding some secondary data from a third source, an internet list of labile verbs that is kept up to date by the linguistic community.26 My compiled list consisting of 1367 records is available as the Collins table in the MS-Access ECorpora database. For each entry it keeps track of verb root, verb part, specific frequently used collocate(s) according to McMillion, lexical group according to Collins, grammatical structure according to Collins and source (X=McMillion, blank=Collins, ?=third party). (see Collins data in Appendix 1)

24 MS-Access has more possibilities for data processing and data retrieval than MS-Excel (My personal experience as a programmer and analyst) 25Online available and retrieved January 2020 at https://grammar.collinsdictionary.com/grammar- pattern/chapter-7-ergative-verbs. 26 Online available and retrieved January 2020 at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_ergative_verbs 28

5. Match the main English ergative verbs with their translation equivalents in German, French, Dutch and Danish.

To be a main English ergative verb, my criterion is that it shows up in all four English corpora.

This selection is available in the EVerbs table. From the 1367 verbs (see previous section) 299 are retained in this selection. These verbs are linked to their translation equivalents in German, French, Dutch and Danish by a copy-paste look up of the translation equivalents using the Google Translate interface. The translation equivalents are retrieved using four variants for each verb entry : a bare , a to infinitive, first person singular of the verb and don’t + infinitive. This technique avoids automatic translation mistakes since the data are scrutinized side by side and any anomaly is edited. Language proficiency is still important, even with automatic translation systems available.27 The translation data are stored in four tables, named EnglishGerman, EnglishFrench, EnglishDutch and EnglishDanish., which also keep track of verb variants as they show up in translation : synonyms, reflexive variants, multi-word verbs etc… These four tables are linked together through the queries Translate1, Translate2 and Translate3.

6. Establish a cross-linguistic ranking of these verbs.

In a next step, the queries Selection1, Selection2 and Selection3 are used to create a Union of cross- linguistic frequency rankings of the ergative verbs and their translation equivalents in all five languages. These queries are also linked to the data in Collins table. Finally, a table Selection28 is created containing the fore mentioned data.

Figure 3 -- Table Selection (Selectie) – Sample of Selection (See complete data in eCorpora MS-Access Database)

27 Despite the continuous improvements, there still are mistakes, especially with isolated words, as the system has no context and no clue… 28 The name of this table in the database is actually ‘Selectie’ 29

7. Make a selection for analysis

The entries with the highest scores and rankings are selected in the Selection table. I limit the selection to about 25 verb roots + extended forms, divided in 6 lexical groups29. The actual selection can be seen in queries SelectieQ and SelectieQQ.

The next scheme visualizes the data matching in my computer generated selection as applied in my ECorpora MS-Access database.

Mc Million’s List (2006) ENGLISH GERMAN FRENCH DUTCH DANISH

EC1 GC1 FC1 NC1 DC1 G-Translate

EC2 GC2 FC2 NC2 DC2

EC3

EC4

Collins Dict. (2020) EC GC FC NC DC G-Translate

Dataset EC’ GC’ FC’ NC’ DC’ Figure 4 – Data streams between Data sources, corpora, selections

29 Personal choice to keep this research manageable : this selection will generate 25 x 5 x 15 x 6 = 11.250 entries in the next part of this research. 30

Section 2.2. Selection

On the basis of my frequency research I selected the following meanings related to English verbs and their translation equivalents in four languages for further investigation. The next table shows the selection in English, with an ‘ad hoc’ division in five groups on the basis of the semantic clusters of Collins Cobuild online list. Table 11 - Selection of English verbs, exemplary for the cross-linguistic meaning30

Group Members Lexical cluster 1 open, close, shut open & close 2 begin, end, start, stop, continue, finish begin & end 3 turn, change, develop, increase, decrease, improve change I 4 break, rip, split, crack, tear, burn change II 5 play, run, move, download media31

I checked the English selection off with the inventory of transitively-intransitively alternating verbs in Levin (1993) to verify the semantics involved and to confirm them as alternations, taking the form of ‘NP V NP’ alternating with ‘NP V (PP)’ since this will be the format of the constructions under investigation. This is a double check because they were entered as such on the basis of the data of Collins Cobuild online list. While working with verbs and its participants, I keep being aware of what Levin (1993: 1) proposes, namely work within a theory that “provide[s] linguistically motivated lexical entries for verbs which incorporate a representation of verb meaning and which allow the meanings of verbs to be properly associated with the syntactic expressions of their arguments.” (ibid.: 1) While Levin (1993: 25-32) distinguishes three subtypes in the transitivity alternations : the middle alternation, a set of alternations labeled “causative alternations”, and an alternation termed the “substance/source” alternation, I am particularly interested in the causative alternations. As commonly known, causative alternations are so called since they involve verbs with transitive and intransitive uses, where the transitive use of a verb V can be paraphrased as roughly “cause to V- intransitive” (Levin 1993: 26-27). In the causative/inchoative alternation, a number of verbs of my selection are mentioned in the following semantic groups, namely the “roll” verb move (ibid.: 28), the “break” verbs break, crack, rip, split and tear (ibid.: 28) and the “other alternating verbs of change of state” burn, change, close, decrease, increase and improve, including verbs that are “zero- related to adjective” e.g. open and shut (ibid.: 28-29). In part two of her book, she classifies English verbs in functional semantic clusters and describes the use and (im)possible alternations. The verbs from my selection apparently belong to different classes, e.g. “split verbs” like break, rip, split and tear (ibid.: 166), “turn verbs” like turn and change(ibid.: 176). With each occurrence in semantic clusters Levin mentions and exemplifies that most “turn [and] change of state “ verbs can appear in a causative/inchoative alternations and/or middle alternations. Aspectual verbs, including begin verbs e.g. begin, continue, end, finish, start and stop all have intransitive uses and these also allow transitive causative uses (ibid.: 274) . Twenty-two out of the twenty-five verbs I investigate are confirmed in causative/inchoative alternations. Run and download have no confirmed causative/inchoative alternations in Levin’s book.

30 When referring to the English verb, I use italics, when referring to the cross-linguistic meaning I use ‘quotes’. 31 Since the dawn of the internet, around 1995 in the USA, from 1998 on in Belgium, ergative verbs in the media group have become very productive with computer media (file, program, disk etc.) and events (play, run, move, copy, paste, rip, open, close etc..) 31

This does not come as a surprise because in 1993 people did not run a program or download a file and the concept of programs running by themselves or files downloading was not known to the general public. Things have changed as these verbs are now among the 25 most frequently used verbs with a labile alternation in English and corresponding alternations and strategies in other languages. This accounts for verb 23 and 24 in this research. The 25th verb of my investigation, play, seems to have stayed under the radar. Levin confirms the collocates music and game with this verb (ibid.: 178) but does not confirm a causative/inchoative alternation e.g. I play a song, a record / A song, a record plays. I assume as for the intransitive use, in 1993, before the digital and world wide web revolution, music played a lot less by itself just as doors and all kinds of other devices did not act by themselves. Now they do, or so it appears, although it is just sensor technology.

In order to give an idea of the relative frequency in the selection (Which one is more frequent? Which one is less frequent? How do they relate?) I provide a cross-linguistic ranking of the meanings as they emerged in this selection :

Table 12 – Ranking of cross-linguistic meanings as they appeared

Rank in this selection Meaning in English Group32 Cross-linguistic score33 1 ‘begin’ 2 58 2 ‘start’ 2 66 3 ‘play’ 5 68 4 ‘open’ 1 88 5 ‘develop’ 3 90 6 ‘change’ 3 122 7 ‘improve’ 3 125 8 ‘close’ 1 144 9 ‘stop’ 2 148 10 ‘increase’ 3 151 11 ‘shut’ 1 171 12 ‘turn’ 3 191 13 ‘move’ 5 197 14 ‘run’ 5 212 15 ‘end’ 2 243 16 ‘break’ 4 260 17 ‘continue’ 2 267 18 ‘finish’ 2 402 19 ‘burn’ 4 439 20 ‘split’ 4 514 21 ‘decrease’ 3 589 22 ‘tear’ 4 601 23 ‘crack’ 4 681 24 ‘rip’ 4 785 25 ‘download’34 5 ?

32 As clustered in table 11 33 This score is the sum of the ranks of the verbs in each frequency list. 34 I added this meaning and ambitransitive verb as it seems to have become the main event on interactive webpages. Corpora are bound to misrepresent its frequency : often the word functions as a button label, which 32

This is the dataset in all 5 languages :

Table 13 – Initial cross-linguistic dataset

English German French Dutch Danish open & open, (sich) öffnen, ('s) ouvrir open(doen),open(gaan), åbne, åbne close open up aufmachen (se) fermer, openen op group close, (sich) schließen, terminer (af)sluiten, dichtdoen lukke, lukke shut zumachen op

begin & begin, beginnen, starten, commencer, beginnen, starten begynde, end start anfangen ouvrir (be)eindigen, stoppen starte group end, stop, (be)enden, (se) ende, finish stoppen, terminer, slutte,

abschließen, (s')arrêter, stoppe, erledigen, finir afslutte

aufhören, halten

continue fortsetzen, continuer verderdoen, doorgaan fortsætte fortfahren, weiterführen,

weitermachen, weitergehen change turn, turn (sich) drehen, tourner, draaien drehe, I group over, turn (sich) wenden, retourner, se vende, around (sich) umdrehen, retourner vende abbiegen rundt

change (sich)(ver)ändern, (se) changer veranderen skifte wechseln

develop (sich) entwickeln (se) (zich) ontwikkelen udvikle développer increase (sich) erhöhen, augmenter toenemen øge decrease zunehmen diminuer afnemen, verminderen formindske improve (sich) verringern, (s') verbeteren forbedre abnehmen améliorer, (sich) verbessern augmenter change break, (sich) brechen, briser, breken, barsten, bryde, II group break up, zerbrechen, rompre, splitsen bryde op, crack, aufbrechen, craquer, knække, split knacken, spalten, casser, (se) splitte (ver)scheuren (sich) trennen diviser rippe, rive, (se) déchirer rive op is a graphic object. As such, it is never taken into account as this is not scanned as text. Moreover I want to include it because it has not been studied in an ergative context to the best of my knowledge and because an initial pilot study revealed enticing grammatical variation. 33

rip, tear, reißen, zerreißen, tear up aufreißen

burn (ver)brennen brûler (ver)branden brænde

media play (ab)spielen jouer (af)spelen spille group run, ausführen exécuter uitvoeren udføre execute

move verschieben, (se) déplacer verplaatsen, verzetten flytte (sich) bewegen, versetzen download (herunter)laden, télécharger downloaden downloade downloaden My manual pilot study confirmed this computer generated selection. (See data in Appendix)

Notice that there are quite a few synonyms in this set within each language itself. In translation often one of the synonyms in one language will be translated into one of the synonyms in another language, and depending on taste, context, style etc… This will not always be the same one. Logically the ones with the highest frequencies should show up most. On the other hand, translation equivalents may show up that are not in this list.

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Part 3 – Research and analysis Section 3.1 Methodology

1. Introduction

Our next step in this research is to study the cross-linguistic selection of verbs from the previous part of our study in anticausative/causative alternations. The English verbs will initially all show up in labile alternations, because that is how they were selected in the first place, namely on the basis of the data of McMillion and Collins. To obtain the corresponding data in German, French, Dutch and Danish, online translation systems are used. In recent times these systems all make use of neural network technology, implemented as ‘learning systems’ as they learn (adapt) their data continuously on the basis of massive, growing amounts of input, in which user input plays a key role.

These systems improved a lot over the last decade. One still has to remember though that these systems are not infallible, and probably never will be as we are neither : language, and especially translation between languages, is extremely complex. There are many ways to express something, many alternatives with even more possible translations, depending on context, purpose, understanding and misunderstanding, humor, emotion, metaphor, individual differences, culture, etc… So, when we use translation, there is always a complex relationship of m possibilities in the source language in relation to n possibilities in the target language.

The original English data are prototypical : all verbs can be easily used in ergative alternations. Still, we have to remember that this alternation is never default but always restricted. It depends first and foremost on the acceptability of the [verb+medium] combination in terms of meaning and use and subsequently on the broader context that may further clarify the meaning and augment the imaginability as we have pointed out earlier with our ‘the bottles opened in shipping’ example.

Prototypical in this context means that for these verbs it is easy to bring forth a series of mediums for which the use and meaning are easy to accept as they are common and frequently used. The number one example is probably ‘John opens the door.’ vs ‘The door opens.’

2. A first dataset is general, using general agents / media / patients.

In this set I use someone as subject/agent and something as object/patient or subject/patient. By choosing these general participants, this makes the clauses both vague and easily acceptable as everyone can fill out the someone and something for themselves. Furthermore, I argue if a verb does not function in this alternation, then it will be very difficult to produce other mediums for this verb functioning ambitransitively. e.g. Open (v) : we can say… Someone has opened something. Something has opened. (active voice, present perfect – ergative alternation) Someone opens something. Something opens. (active voice, simple present – ergative alternation)

In functional terminology : someone is an animate instigator, something is an inanimate medium I am aware this ‘general’ dataset is limited too. I do not consider inanimate instigators, not in this set and not in the next sets. This is as far as I choose to go in this thesis to keep it manageable.

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I start from NP V NP / NP V alternations, so I do not include NP V PP. In translation NP V PP-clauses emerge as translation equivalents and idiomatic expressions likewise.

All 25 verbs in the dataset allow ergative alternations. For the complete set I refer to Appendix 2, page _

3. A second dataset is constructed, using frequently used mediums and he/she as instigator.

In order to get a selection of frequently used mediums I have retrieved a list of in English, sorted by frequency. The source used was The English Web Corpus (enTenTen15), the interface was Sketch Engine. (see Data in Appendix 4 p 69)

I constructed common grammatical sentences, which should pass a grammatical acceptability test.35 Whether these clauses are used naturally will prove in translation since the translation algorithms replace uncommon clauses by more common and frequent clauses thus providing ‘better’ alternatives in back-translation. e.g. Open (v) : we can say… He has opened the window. The window has opened. (active voice, present perfect – ergative alternation) He opens the window. The window opens. (active voice, simple present – ergative alternation)

All 25 verbs in the second dataset allow ergative alternations. For the complete set I refer to Appendix 2, page _

4. A third dataset uses obvious collocates, in this case mediums that show up about equally frequently as subject and as object in English.

I have retrieved these data from The English Web Corpus (enTenTen15) using the collocates-option of Sketch Engine.

35 I remember we used to make these kind of exercises in the seventies in secondary school, filling out the ‘correct forms / tenses’ and converting sentences from active to passive and vice versa, without ever wondering if people actually said that.

36

Figure 5 – Example of collocates retrieval using Sketch Engine

Here I constructed common sentences choosing mediums ranking as equally high as possible both as subject and as object in a clause and preferably in the same tense. These certainly should pass the acceptability test as they occur frequently in the corpus, though not necessarily with our named subjects36. e.g. Open (v) : we can say… Martin has opened the door. The door has opened. (active voice, present perfect – ergative alternation) Martin opens the door. The door opens. (active voice, simple present – ergative alternation)

36 I deliberately used popular names that should be recognized by the translation systems in all languages used.

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5. Translating the datasets

Machine Translation (MT) is a subfield of computational linguistics that focuses on translating text from one language to another using deep learning technology implemented into Neural Machine Translation (NMT) using continually improving complex powerful algorithms able to translate cross- linguistically between more than a hundred languages. Google Translate is the leading industry example of NMT, but other tech companies all over the world have joined in on this and massive datasets of translated sentences are used to train models capable of translating between any two languages.37 I mainly use Google Translate, and DeepL and Bing translation for a ‘second opinion’. According to the updated paper of Milam Aiken (2019) the quality of the translations of Google has improved a lot since 2011, the year of his first paper on the subject of the quality of the translations in Google Translate. In 2011, a comprehensive evaluation of accuracy using 51 languages with Google Translate showed that many European languages take good results, but several Asian languages performed poorly. The online service has improved its accuracy over the intervening eight years, and a reevaluation using the same text as the original study shows a 34% improvement based upon BLEU scores38. This new study demonstrates that translations between English and German, Afrikaans, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Greek, Polish, Hungarian, Finnish and Chinese tend to be the most accurate.39

From Aiken’s (2019:253) Table 1. Google Translate Study I copied the data for the languages in my research. Table 14 - Scores Quality of Translation from and to English40 Language Bard Tarzan Fail BLEU1 BLEU2 Tarzan2 BLEU3 Danish 40 70 30 84 84 100 82 Dutch 52.5 65 35 82 71 95 84 French 45 60 40 91 89 95 88 German 60 82.5 18 77 72 99 81

If you add up the scores, you’ll get an indicative score illustrating that they all perform equally well. I conclude that the quality of the translations between English and these languages are comparable and balanced, which is important to my research and the methodology I use.

6. Data storage

Initially I used an MS-Excel Workbook named DATASET TRANSLATIONS ANA in which I stored all the results. There are 6 Worksheets.

Worksheet1 [GEN-G] holds the cross-linguistic data of the first dataset (GENERAL), Worksheet2 [CON-G] holds the cross-linguistic data of the second dataset (CONSTRUCTS)

37 Based on Quinn Lanners 2019, https://towardsdatascience.com/neural-machine-translation, retrieved June 13 2020. 38 BLEU (bilingual evaluation understudy) is an algorithm for evaluating the quality of text which has been machine-translated from one natural language to another. 39 Based on Aiken, Milam. 2019. An Updated Evaluation of Google Translate Accuracy. Studies in Linguistics and Literature, p253. 40 For a discussion of the Bard, Tarzan and BLEU scores as quantifiers of empirical evaluation of translation quality I refer to https://www.teachyoubackwards.com/empirical-evaluation/ 38

Worksheet3 [COL-G] holds the cross-linguistic data of the third dataset (COLLOCATES) In these three worksheets I used Google Translate to translate from English to German, French, Dutch and Danish, from German to English, French, Dutch and Danish, from French to English, German, Dutch and Danish, from Dutch to English, German, French and Danish, and from Danish to English, German, French and Dutch.

Worksheet4 [GEN-D] holds the cross-linguistic data of the first dataset (GENERAL) Worksheet5 [CON-D] holds the cross-linguistic data of the second dataset (CONSTRUCTS) Worksheet6 [COL-D] holds the cross-linguistic data of the third dataset (COLLOCATES). In these three worksheets I used Linguee DeepL to translate from English to German, French and Dutch, from German to English, French and Dutch, from French to English, German and Dutch, from Dutch to English, German and French. I used Bing Translation to translate from English, German, French and Dutch to Danish and from Danish to English, German, French and Dutch.41

The translation procedure has been consistently the same for all sets : I worked per block of 25 sentences using the page interface of the translations systems. Since all systems use all sentences as ‘context’ for each other, chances are that the alternations, which are on one line, are translated in relation to each other. Accordingly, that is a good thing. Chances are too, that the whole block is interpreted as one ‘larger context’, hence that too would be OK. The thing is, that no one really knows how the algorithms work (except the developers of course) as Neural network technology is a black box. The main criterion to use this or that version depends mainly on the performance of the system. However, it is not up to users to tweak things : we use it as a valuable assistant, and we watch it, using our language proficiency.

That is also why I work with three translation systems and translate back and forth between the languages : 3 translators will provide me with more information and the ability to uncover consistencies and inconsistencies. Eventually, all ergative and alternative strategies in this study should emerge in the analysis.

The total size of this data collection can be calculated as follows :

25 English verbs are used in 3 datasets (=times 3) of alternating (=times 2) clauses, each once in simple present and once in present perfect (=times 2). These clauses are translated in 4 languages (=times 4) and each translation is translated back twice (= times 2) to the other 4 languages (=times 4), once using Google Translate and once using a combination of DeepL and Bing Translation, which gives a total of 25 * 3 * 2 * 2 * 4 * 2 * 4 = 9600 clauses.

In a next step I imported all the data into an MS-Access database for further processing. MS-Access is a Relational Database Management System, perfectly fit to explore relationships between data. Observation and analysis, grouping and linking on the basis of selections and contrasts, processing, querying and reporting are all part of this elaborate system and will be used and explained while proceeding. This methodology is in many respects time saving and has a potential to uncover linguistic facts and links and to explore hypotheses and intuitions, that would not have been possible – or at least very time-consuming – if attempted with manual methods.

41 Danish is not part of the DeepL system yet. That is why I use Bing Translation instead. 39

7. Focus of the study and possible issues with machine translation

Machine translation is a valuable tool. Nonetheless translation is very complex, especially cross- linguistically between several languages. After reading ‘Is that a Fish in your Ear’ by David Bellos42, I am very well aware of this. Despite the huge and impressive progress, machine translation is still not perfect. Sometimes a translation is not grammatically correct. Especially translation of words or sentences without context will often generate unwanted results. Moreover machines can mislink , a phenomenon which resembles human misunderstanding and misinterpretation. In analyzing the data, I mark all results that are not usable, for whatever reason. At some point I will mention a few errors, because one can learn from mistakes. Evaluation of machine translation is not the focus of this thesis though, so I am not going to point out each time or position when and where I notice fails. The focus of this comparative study will always be the cross-linguistic ergative strategies in the way they emerge from the datasets since this system functions well enough for this purpose. Of course these data are not absolute because frequency of use can change over time, corpora change, user proficiency changes, machine translation changes and in the end, as commonly known, many aspects of language itself evolve over time and at different paces. The results of this study are indicative though of existing strategies, including strategies that have not been highlighted enough. If you are interested in the translation data : the worksheets and databases with the data are available – see link page xvii (or you can e-mail me).

8. MS-Access Proceedings

In a first step, the six MS-Excel worksheet pages (GEN-G, CON-G, COL-G, GEN-D, CON-D and COL-D) were imported into six tables with the same names in the AnaData Database. They were then merged into one table named UNION DATA. Next, an eStrategies table was created as a repository to store all verbal components and their features. This is the record-structure for each entry :

Table 15 – Record-structure eStrategies table Field Fieldname Description number 1 Id Index (unique autonumbering key) 2 Type Either A for Anticausative use or C for Causative use 3 Meaning Verbal meaning 4 English Verbal entry in English 5 German Verbal entry in German 6 French Verbal entry in French 7 Dutch Verbal entry in Dutch 8 Danish Verbal entry in Danish 9 StrEnglish Strategy in English 10 StrGerman Strategy in German 11 StrFrench Strategy in French

42 Bellos, David. 2011. Is that a Fish in your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation. London : Penguin Books

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12 StrDutch Strategy in Dutch 13 StrDanish Strategy in Danish 14 NoteEnglish Specification of strategy in English 15 NoteGerman Specification of strategy in German 16 NoteFrench Specification of strategy in French 17 NoteDutch Specification of strategy in Dutch 18 NoteDanish Specification of strategy in Danish 19 MorphoEnglish Morphological specification in English 20 MorphoGerman Morphological specification in German 21 MorphoFrench Morphological specification in French 22 MorphoDutch Morphological specification in Dutch 23 MorphoDanish Morphological specification in Danish 24 Cluster Semantic cluster # 25 Ambi Ambitransitive meaning in English 26 Oppo Opposite meanings in English 27 NoteCross Cross-linguistic feature

Contents abbreviations used:

1. With meaning (field 3) : verbal meaning + indication of use (tr) for transitive and (intr) for intransitive

2. With verbal entries (fields 4-6) : $ in front of the entry denotes the entry will not be processed in this research. In most cases this $-indicator was entered either because of a translation error or to signal an algorithmic failure or a mislink in translation, which is comparable to human misunderstanding. All mistakes in interpreting the translated clauses are my own.

3. With strategies (fields 9-13) : L = labile, S= suppletive, C= causative, AC= anticausative, E = equipollent. X = not defined (corresponds with $ verbal entry)

4. With specifications of strategies (fields 14-18) : R = root Clitic insertions: SICH = clitic insertion (German), SE = clitic insertion (French), SIG = clitic insertion (Danish), ZICH = clitic insertion (Dutch) Verb type : SV = suffixed verb SP = s-passive (only occurs in Danish) PV = phrasal verb (includes verb + particle, verb + predicative adjective, verb + PP) PI = verb + idiomatic phrase BE-constructions :

BP = be + (past participle)adjective

BPS = se + be + (past participle)adjective (only occurs in French)

BPV = be + (past participle)adjective + prepositional phrase

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BI = be + idiomatic phrase BA = be + adjective BAD = be + adverb SC = structural change

There is an additional field (27) reserved to enter cross-linguistic features on the basis of further comparison of the data.

5. With morphological specifications of strategies (fields 19-23) : x = 1,2,3… Lx Labile, no change Rx Root, basic form Dx Derivation

6. With ambitransitive meaning in English (field 25) : e.g. open for both open (tr.) and open (intr.) (see data – meaning in Table 12)

7. With semantic cluster # (field 24) : each entry with the same meaning (synonym, translation equivalent) gets the same number.

8. With opposite meanings (field 26) : all opposite meanings from the meanings in Table 12

All data are personal observations and interpretations of the verbal constructions in the original worksheets. Verbal entries, strategies and specifications are entered using input query interfaces linked to the eStrategies table, semantic features (fields 2, 3, 24, 25 and 26) are entered directly into the eStrategies table.

The strategies denoted are straightforward since they correspond with the causative / inchoative alternations as distinguished by Haspelmath (1993). As for the specifications, they are my grammatical interpretations of the verbal features observed.

The next table gives a cross-linguistic overview of verbal entries in the eStrategies table. I chose a random meaning from each semantic cluster to exemplify the contents of this table. The complete table is available in Appendix 2 page ---.

Table 16 – Cross-linguistic overview of verbal entries in the eStrategies table (SAMPLE) Meaning English German French Dutch Danish open (tr) open, öffnen ouvrir openen åbne opendoen open (intr) open, sich öffnen, s’ouvrir opengaan åbne sig open up, aufgehen openstaan åbnes (be+) open (sein+) offen s’(+être)ouvert (zijn+) geopend (være+) åbnet (sein+) geöffnet (zijn+) opengegaan close (tr) close, schliessen, herunterschalten fermer sluiten, lukke, shut down afsluiten, dichtdoen close (intr) close sich schliessen se fermer sluiten, lukke, dichtgaan lukkes (be+) closed (sein+) geschlossen, (être+)fermé (zijn+) gesloten (være+)lukket (zijn+) dicht

42 end (tr) end, beenden terminer eindigen Ende finish, erledigen finir complete abschliessen beëindigen afslutte fertig stellen afmaken zu ende gehen mettre fin à afronden $être en train de (zijn+)klaar met terminer $ved at ende end (intr) end, enden se terminer eindigen ende finish prendre fin ophouden slutte complete (be+)finished (sein+)beendet (être+)terminé (zijn+)beëindigd (være+) færdig (be+)over (sein+)vorbei (être+)fini (zijn+)ten einde (være+) afsluttet (be+)complete (sein+)fertig (zijn+)afgelopen (være+) forbi (sein+)zu ende (zijn+)af er (sein+)abgeschlossen (zijn+)voltooid (zijn+)voorbij decrease decrease senken diminuer verminderen reducere (tr) reduce reduzieren baisser verlagen falde lower vermindern réduire sænke diminish verringern faire descender mindske fall faire tomber formindske drop faire baisser $verkleinen take down $verzwakken (have+)tabt decrease decrease sinken diminuer dalen falde (intr) drop fallen baisser vallen lower abnehmen decliner afnemen reduce abheben décoller omlaaggaan fall zurückgehen tomber go down (sein+)gefallen (être+)en baisse (zijn+)afgenomen (være+)faldet (sein+)zurückgegangen (être) abaissé (zijn+)gedaald (være+)mindre (sein+)gesunken (être+)tombé (zijn+)verlaagd (være+) gået ned (være+) på vej ned (være+) taget (være+) reduceret (være+) sænket split (tr) split knacken fendre splijten splitte crack brechen briser splitsen dele divide spalten diviser delen opdele teilen partager déchirer tear apart auseinanderreißen uit elkaar rukken $share split (intr) split brechen se fendre splitsen splitte crack knacken se briser zich splitsen dele sig tear se diviser splitte sig separate sich spalten splittes divide sich trennen shatter sich teilen (être+) divisé (être+) fendu (be+)split (sein+)gespalten s’(être+) fendu (zijn+)gespleten (være+) delt (be+)torn (sein+)zerrissen s’(être+) séparé (zijn+)gescheurd (være+) splittet (sein+)zerbrochen s’(être+) brisé (zijn+)verdeeld s’(être+) cassé s’(être+) divisé $(zijn+)verbrijzeld

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download download herunterladen (en train de) downloaden downloade (tr) télécharger hente download download herunterladen (en train de) downloaden downloade (intr) télécharger downloades hentes

(be+)downloaded (être+)téléchargé (zijn+)gedownload (være+) downloadet $upload (være+) hentet

The data in the Cross-linguistic overview of verbal entries in the eStrategies table in Appendix 2 showcase all verbal entries, together with the denotations for each entry of strategy, specification of strategy and other semantic features are up for analysis, which I will start in the next session. First, I investigate the strategies per language. Second, I compare the strategies cross-linguistically. Third, I attempt a semantic and structural interpretation of the strategies observed. In a final chapter I return to the observations per meaning and involve preferred mediums obtained through the collocate option of the Sketch Engine interface to describe agreements and differences and I repeat this procedure for each semantic cluster.

Before setting off I aim to embed my observations in a formal and general description of potential ergative strategies.

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9. Introduction of aspect as part of the ergative strategy

Inspired by Jespersen’s (1931) and Comrie’s (1931) change of state concepts and Abraham’s (2003) definition of past participle denoting a voiceless, unaccusative, resultative state of an action, we can formulate the changes of state expressed by the intransitive verbs and the causation of these changes of state expressed by their transitive counterparts in the following way:

In case of perfect aspect e.g. present perfect, with an event completed in the past but with a relationship to the present and the state denoted by the past participle, one could refer to this state with a nominalized attributive adjective on the basis of the past participle of the verb e.g. an opened, closed, etc… state. The medium could be referred to the same way : e.g. an opened door, a closed window.

For Group 1 : verb(x) in intransitive clause : (1) = to change into perfective state (x) : x in { opened, closed, shut } & verb (x) in transitive clause(x) : to cause (1)

For Group 2 : verb (x) in intransitive clause : (2) = to change into perfective state (x) : x in { begun, ended, started, stopped, continued, finished} & verb (x) in transitive clause : to cause (2)

For Group 3 : verb (x) in intransitive clause : (3) = to change into perfective state (x) : x in { turned, changed, developed, increased, decreased, improved} & verb (x) in transitive clause : to cause (3)

For Group 4 : verb (x) in intransitive clause : (4) = to change into perfective state (x) : x in { broken, ripped, split, cracked, torn, burned } & verb (x) in transitive clause : to cause (4)

For Group 5 : verb (x) in intransitive clause : (5) = to change into perfective state (x) : x in { } & verb (x) in transitive clause : to cause (5)

This can be generalized as

verb (x) in intransitive clause : (y) = to change into perfective state (x) : x in { y-verb} & verb (x) in transitive clause : to cause (y) AND y-verb in { opened, closed, shut, begun, ended, started, stopped, continued, finished, { turned, changed, developed, increased, decreased, improved, broken, ripped, split, cracked, torn, burned, played, run, moved, downloaded }

In case of a progressive aspect e.g. present continuous, with an event occurring and progressing now for some time and a state denoted by the present participle, one could refer to this state with a nominalized attributive adjective on the basis of the present participle of the verb e.g. an opening, closing, etc… state. The medium could be referred to the same way : e.g. an opening door, a closing window

For Group 1 : verb(x) in intransitive clause : (1) = to change into state in progress (x) : x in { opening, closing, shutting } & verb (x) in transitive clause(x) : to cause (1)

For Group 2 : verb(x) in intransitive clause : (2) = to change into state in progress (x) : x in { beginning, ending, starting, stopping, continuing, finishing} & verb (x) in transitive clause : to cause (2)

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For Group 3 : verb (x) in intransitive clause : (3) = to change into state in progress(x) : x in { turning, changing, developing, increasing, decreasing, improving} & verb (x) in transitive clause : to cause (3)

For Group 4 : verb (x) in intransitive clause : (4) = to change into state in progress (x) : x in { breaking, ripping, splitting, cracking, tearing, burning } & verb (x) in transitive clause : to cause (4)

For Group 5 : verb (x) in intransitive clause : (5) = to change into state in progress(x) : x in { playing, running, moving, downloading} & verb (x) in transitive clause : to cause (5)

This can be generalized as

verb (x) in intransitive clause : (y) = to change into state in progress (x) : x in { y-verb} & verb (x) in transitive clause : to cause (y) AND y-verb in { opening, closing, shutting, beginning, ending, starting, stopping, continuing, finishing, turning, changing, developing, increasing, decreasing, improving, breaking, ripping, splitting, cracking, tearing, burning, playing, running, moving, downloading}

In case of a simple aspect e.g. simple present, with an event occurring now, habitual or timeless and the state denoted by the bare infinitive, one could refer to this state with an nominalized attributive adjective on the basis of the bare infinitive of the verb extended with a suffix denoting ability, state, property, characteristic or feature e.g. it is ‘open’-able, ‘close’-able. The medium could be referred to the same way : e.g. an ‘open’-able door, a ‘close’-able window. One could consider the word between quotes as a lexical label denoting the state : e.g. a state labelled ‘open’ , a state labelled ‘close’. Mediums can also be circumscribed with + infinitive denoting a characteristic or property : e.g. a door can open, a window can close.

For Group 1 : verb(x) in intransitive clause : (1) = to change into momentary, habitual or timeless state(x) : x in { open, close, shut} & verb (x) in transitive clause(x) : to cause (1)

For Group 2 : verb(x) in intransitive clause : (2) = to change into momentary, habitual or timeless state(x) : x in { begin, end, start, stop, continue, finish} & verb (x) in transitive clause : to cause (2)

For Group 3 : verb (x) in intransitive clause : (3) = to change into momentary, habitual or timeless state(x) : x in { turn, change, develop, increase, decrease, improve} & verb (x) in transitive clause : to cause (3)

For Group 4 : verb (x) in intransitive clause : (4) = to change into momentary, habitual of timeless state(x) : x in { break, rip, split, crack, tear, burn } & verb (x) in transitive clause : to cause (4)

For Group 5 : verb (x) in intransitive clause : (5) = to change into momentary, habitual or timeless state(x) : x in {play, run, move, download} & verb(x) in transitive clause : to cause (5)

For labile verbs, this can be generalized as

Labile verb (x) in intransitive clause : (y) = to change into momentary, habitual or timeless state (x) : x in { y-verb} & labile verb (x) in transitive clause : to cause (y) AND y-verb in { open, close, shut, begin, end, start, stop, continue, finish, turn, change, develop, increase, decrease, improve, break, rip, split, crack, tear, burn, play, run, move, download}

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A generalization for the ergative alternation of this selection of verb meanings as expressed in English using 3 tenses with 3 different aspects defined could look like this :

verb meaning (x) in intransitive clause : (y) = to change into aspect(z).state(x) : x in { y-verb} & verb meaning (x) in transitive clause : to cause(y) AND verb meaning in { ‘open’, ‘close’, ‘shut’, ‘begin’, ‘end’, ‘start’, ‘stop’, ‘continue’, ‘finish’, ‘turn’, ‘change’, ‘develop’, ‘increase’, ‘decrease’, ‘improve’, ‘break’, ‘rip’, ‘split’, ‘crack’, ‘tear’, ‘burn’, ‘play’, ‘run’, ‘move’, ‘download’} AND z in {perfective, in progress, (momentary, habitual or timeless) }

The extent to which these generalizations hold up cross-linguistically is subject of my research and will be developed in the next chapter.

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Section 3.2 Analysis and observations The verbal entries and their specifications and features as used in this section are drawn from the eStrategies table. These data are manually entered interpretations of the surface appearance and semantic and typological features of all VPs as they occur in the datasets imported from the worksheets containing clauses translated back and forth in English, German, French, Dutch and Danish. The table is available in Appendix 2, pages 6-11. An overview of the contents of the 328 cross-linguistic records in the eStrategies MS-Access table is provided in the next table, showing that there are 936 entries, of which 865 are processed. Table 17 – # of Entries in eStrategies table English German French Dutch Danish Totals Processed 150 184 165 167 199 865 Excluded A 7 1 3 3 6 20 Excluded C 12 8 11 9 11 51 #Entries 169 193 179 179 216 936 A = anticausative/intransitive entry, C = causative/transitive entry It is important to notice that, as this is not an overview of all possible lexicogrammatical alternatives for the meanings of the verbs studied, the data are incomplete and should be incomplete because only frequently used instances are the subject of our investigation.

These data illustrate the use of the selected meanings within the constructed clauses as they are processed by translation systems. The verbs and verb phrases are selected on the basis of concealed and evolving algorithms processing the data in an ever growing advanced dataset repository providing the user with equivalent clauses with the highest frequency in relation to the collocates in these clauses. This is part of my methodology that should enable me to detect grammatical and lexical tendencies of ‘general’43 language use in the context of this selection of verbal meanings with ergative potential. Moreover, it should allow me to formulate hypotheses in relation to the observed phenomena.

In Section 3.2.1 I give an overview of the verb phrase (VP) features per language, in Section 3.2.2 cross-linguistic statistics are provided, in Section 3.2.3 a cross-linguistic structural interpretation is developed and in Section 3.2.4 I make a cross-linguistic semantic comparison of VP-Medium collocates. I use the following terms and abbreviations : ac anticausative use of the VP ‘…’ single quotes refer to meaning c causative use of the VP cross-linguistically be auxiliaries E be ~ G sein ~ F être ~ N zijn ~ D være , used with past participles to build perfect tenses and all tenses in passive voice clitic ‘reflexive’ insertion : G sich ~ F se ~ N zich ~ D sig as part of the VP, anticausative means in anticausative clauses, as part of anticausative alternations have auxiliaries E have ~ D haben ~ F avoir ~ N hebben ~ D have, used with past participles to build perfect tenses labile verb same VP in anticausative and causative clause past participle : f(adj) past participle functioning as an adjective phrasal verb includes VPs : verb + particle, verb + predicative adjective, verb + PP preposition : f(verb) preposition functioning as a verb

43 ‘General’ meaning ‘from diverse sources’ & ‘produced by all kinds of users’ 48

3.2.1 Features per Language

1. English

This table shows all VP synonyms that emerged in the datasets, grouped by morpho-syntactical formation and type of alternation, including a cross-section (∩) where verbs can function as synonyms across semantic boundaries of individual verb meanings.

Table 18 – English dataset VPs from eStrategies table through QeSynonyms English query Meaning Synonyms / alternatives Type ∩ (c)ausative/(a)nticausative ‘open’ open (c/a) labile verb open up (a) phrasal verb (be+) open (a) (be+) adjective ‘close’ close (c/a) labile verb shut down (a) phrasal verb (be+) closed (a) (be+) past participle:f(adjective) close ‘shut’ shut, close (c/a) labile verbs (be+) closed (a) (be+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘begin’ begin, start (c/a) labile verbs begin, start ‘start’ start, begin (c/a) labile verbs ‘stop’ stop, end, finish (c/a) labile verbs quit a job (c) collocate ‘end’ end, finish, complete (a/c) labile verbs (be+)over (a) (be+) adverb end, (be+)finished (a) (be+) past participle:f(adjective) finish (be+)complete (a) (be+) adjective ‘finish’ end, finish, stop (a/c) labile verbs (be+)over (be+) adverb (be+)done, (be)+finished,(be+)completed (be+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘continue’ continue (c/a), labile verbs move on (c/a) including a phrasal verb go on (a), go further (a) phrasal verbs ‘change’ change (c/a) labile verb ‘turn’ turn, spin (c/a) labile verbs

turn around (c) phrasal verb ‘develop’ develop labile verb ‘increase’ increase (c/a) labile verb raise (c) / rise (a) equipollent alternating verbs step up (c), turn up (c) phrasal verbs up (c) preposition : f(verb) go up (a) phrasal verb ‘improve’ improve (c/a) labile verb ‘decrease’ decrease, drop, fall, labile verbs reduce, lower, diminish (c/a) take down (c), go down (a) phrasal verbs

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‘break’ break (c/a) labile verb shatter(a) (be+)broken (be+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘crack’ crack, break (c/a) labile verbs burst (a) (be+)cracked, (be+)broken, (be+) torn (a) (be+) past participle:f(adjective) break, ‘rip’ rip, break, tear, crack (c/a) labile verbs crack (4), rupture (a) tear (3) (be+)ripped, (be+)broken, (be+) torn (a) (be+) past participle:f(adjective) --- ‘split’ split, crack, divide (c/a) labile verbs be torn (4), tear apart (c) phrasal verb be broken tear, separate, shatter (a) (3) (be+)split,(be+)torn (be+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘tear’ tear (a/c) labile verb break, crack, rip (a) tear up (c) (be+)torn,(be+)broken (be+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘burn’ burn (a/c) labile verb (be+)burned (be+) past participle:f(adjective) (be+)on fire (be+) idiomatic phrase ‘play’ play (a/c) labile verb ‘run’ run (a/c), play (a/c) labile verb execute (c) play (be+) executed (a) (be+) past participle:f(adjective) (be+) on, (be+) over (a) (be+) adverb ? ‘move’ move (c/a) labile verb ‘download’ download (c/a) labile verb

(be+) downloaded (be+) past participle:f(adjective)

All meanings can be expressed in English both causatively and anticausatively by means of labile verbs. For a number of verbs, as this is the case here with open, change, develop, improve, play and move, the labile alternation is the only frequently used strategy emergent in this semantic selection.

As an alternative for an , one can frequently observe the use of a syncretism consisting of be, mostly in the simple present, followed by a past participle functioning as an adjective. As mentioned before, a passive reading would be an alternative, but there is no need and no mention of an agent by means of a by-phrase. This can be considered as an alternative construction for the anticausative use of a labile verb, or any alternating verb for that matter.

With open, close, finish, break, crack, rip, split, tear, burn and download, this implements like a pseudo-labile alternation, as an alternative for using the labile verb in the present perfect. Although the present perfect is supposed to express the perfective state of the action, event or situation denoted by the verb, as opposed to the be + past participle expressing the resultative state, which basically comes after the completion of the action, in practical use these two are often used interchangeably, which leads me to conclude that users do not really make this lexico-grammatical distinction. This could fit in an account of stylistic variation, a feature common to language use in general e.g. finish (c) vs (be+) finished has an alternative for (have+) finished. One could also alternatively argue that the final state is often the more important notion to be expressed as visualized in this timeline :

Action starts > action in progress > action completed > result/final state

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This type of alternation can also be regarded at as a suppletive alternation, if the causative verb differs from the verb from which the past participle is used and this is also quite common as we can observe in table 18 since with 9 out of 25 verbal meanings this occurs at least once e.g. finish (c) vs (be+) done or completed (a).

Consequently, the question pops up, if all similar constructions can also be accepted as being part of this strategy since also (be+)adverb and (be+)idiomatic expression can be used this way e.g. ‘They have ended the war / The war has ended (or is over.)’ Moreover, we could also consider idiomatic constructions used to express ongoing events, e.g. ‘They burn the house. / The house burns. vs. The house is on fire’.

Just as could be expected, we see many synonyms with verbs with similar meanings. Still, they are not interchangeable by default in all clauses provided since each verb has its preferred collocate mediums as each medium has its preferred collocate verbs in the unique momentary symbiosis of their interfacing lexical properties within the particular context emerging from the constructive thoughts of the speaker/writer and infiltrating in the imagination of the listener/reader. Verbs and nouns with more general meanings are easier to apply but less guiding in their interpretation as opposed to those that are more specific in leading the imagination. One could compare the general ones with a basic key, which is easy to copy, versus the sophisticated keys that are almost impossible to copy and should be used exactly according to the directions. In this respect I consider verbs like begin, open, change and break as easy keys, while rip and split are more sophisticated. To put it in other words, many events or processes can begin and change, many objects can break, but fewer objects can rip or split. To generate a detailed image, one should provide more context with the easy keys than with the specific ones, since the latter has an intrinsic image and the former can be shaped according to needs (or not shaped if one prefers to be lazy or vague). Especially aspectual verbs like close, begin, start, end and finish and verbs of destruction like break, crack, tear and break in labile alternations and be torn and be broken solely in intransitive clauses can be used beyond their own semantic scope, in other words as synonyms or replacements for adjacent meanings.

I counted the VP alternations and alternatives encountered in this selection of English VPs. There are 43 verbs, of which 1 is a phrasal verb, in labile alternations expressing 25 causative/anticausative meanings, providing on average close to two labile verbs for each meaning. There are 20 occurrences of (be+) past participle with 12 of our 25 selected meanings readable as adjectives that can serve as alternatives for labile verbs in present perfect tense in intransitive clauses. A total of 14 phrasal verbs appear, equally distributed between causative and anticausative uses. Table 19 summarizes these data.

Table 19 – Summary of occurrence of VPs In English selection Labile alternations 48 (1 phrasal verb) Anticausative occurrences of (be+) past participle : f(adjective) 20 Anticausative occurrences of (be+) other 8 Phrasal verbs 14 In Anticausative clause 7 In Causative clause 7 Other verbs (suppletive use) 5 In Anticausative clause 3 In Causative clause 2

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I counted 48 labile verbs covering the 25 meanings of the selection, then these are only the ones that show up frequently in translation. Many other labile verbs are possible too as we know from the labile data in part two of this thesis, but here it is clear, that many verbs are used more often either in transitive clauses or in intransitive clauses. I make the choice not to count the synonyms as suppletive alternatives, nor will I count translation equivalents in this research. As just pointed out on the previous page, despite the fact that on the one hand verbs can be substituted for others, preserving the general meaning of the substituted verb, on the other hand, dependent on the collocate constituents and the broader context, verbs seldom mean exactly the same since they have properties that go beyond a simple one to one relation. That accounts for why writing and translation is much more than just plugging ‘word-modules’ in and out of sentences. Table 20 showcases the distribution of ergatives strategies in English across the 25 meanings examined, with a simple (2nd column) and an alternative perfective pole (last column), both of which can be considered to be realizations of lability using the same verbs in the causative-anticausative alternations.

Table 20 - Common English ergative strategies in this selection. Meaning # Labile # Anticausative # Causative # Equipollent # Be alternations alternations alternations alternations +f(adj)44 ‘open’ 1 0,1 ‘close’ 1 1,0 ‘shut’ 2 1,0 ‘begin’ 2 ‘start’ 2 ‘stop’ 3 ‘end’ 3 1,2 ‘finish’ 3 3,1 ‘continue’ 2 ‘change’ 1 ‘turn’ 2 ‘develop’ 1 ‘increase’ 1 1 ‘improve’ 1 ‘decrease’ 6 ‘break’ 1 1,0 ‘crack’ 2 3,0 ‘rip’ 4 3,0 ‘split’ 3 2,0 ‘tear’ 1 2,0 ‘burn’ 1 1,1 ‘play’ 1 run 2 ‘move’ 1 0,2 ‘download’ 1 1,0 total meanings 25 1 13 total verb pairs 48 1 19 rank 1

44 The first count refers to past participles functioning as adjectives, the second count refers to underived adjectives/ 52

So for now, two features stand out : (1) Labile verbs are by far the most used strategy in this context, which only confirms what is commonly known. (2) There is a possible syncretic reading of the frequently occurring [auxiliary + past participle] as [be + adjective] which can be considered as an anticausative alternative for the present perfect use of labile verbs in English, a feature I consider to be part of the implementation of a labile ergative strategy that has not been excessively documented in English to the best of my knowledge. This would need further research, especially because it seems to relate to a broader phenomenon including adjectival, adverbial and idiomatic constructions with similar semantics and functions, not only in English, but in all languages of my investigation, as further analysis will clearly demonstrate.

2. German

Table 21 presents all VP synonyms that emerged in the datasets, grouped by morpho-syntactical formation and type of alternation, including a cross-section (∩).

Table 21 – German dataset VPs from eStrategies table through QeSynonyms German query Meaning Synonyms / alternatives Type ∩ (c)ausative/(a)nticausative ‘open’ (sich) öffnen (a/c) anticausative alternation aufgehen (a) phrasal verb

(sein+)geöffnet (a) (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) (sein+)offen (a) (sein+) adjective ‘close’ (sich) schliessen (a/c) anticausative alternation (sein+)geschlossen (a) (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) (sich) ‘shut’ schliessen (c/a) labile verb schliessen (sich) schliessen (a/c) anticausative alternation (sein+)geschlossen (a) (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘begin’ beginnen (a/c) labile verb anfangen (c) separable prefixed verb beginnen mit (c) verb + prepositional phrase beginnen, ‘start’ starten (a/c) labile verb anfangen anfangen (a/c) labile separable prefixed verb beginnen (a) inseparable prefixed verb beginnen mit (c) verb + prepositional phrase ‘stop’ stoppen (a/c) labile verb anhalten (a/c) labile separable prefixed verb beenden (c) inseparable prefixed verb einstellen (c) separable prefixed verb aufhören (a) separable prefixed verb stehenbleiben (a) phrasal verb (Job/Stelle) kündigen (c) collocate (sein+)beendet, (sein+)eingestellt (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) (a) ‘end’ (be)enden (c/a) causative alternation (be)enden erledigen (c) inseparable prefixed verb abschliessen (c) separable prefixed verb (sein+)beendet, abgeschlossen, (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) erledigt, getan (a) (sein+) vorbei (a) (sein+) adverb fertig stellen, zu Ende gehen (c) phrasal verbs ‘finish’ (be)enden (c/a) causative alternation (sein+)beendet, abgeschlossen, (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) erledigt, getan (a) (sein+) vorbei (a) (sein+) adverb

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zu Ende sein (a), zu Ende bringen (c) phrasal verbs fertig sein mit (c) verb + prepositional phrase ‘continue’ fortsetzen (a/c) labile separable prefixed verb weitergehen (c) phrasal verb weitergehen mit, weitermachen mit verb + prepositional phrase (c) (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) (sein+)fortgesetzt ‘change’ verändern, wechseln labile verbs (sich) (ver)ändern (a/c) anticausative alternations ‘turn’ (sich) (ver)ändern (a/c) anticausative alternations (sich) (sich) wenden, (sich) drehen (c/a) (ver)ändern umdrehen (c) separable prefixed verb (sein+)umgedreht, umgekehrt (a) (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘develop’ (sich) entwickeln (a/c) anticausative alternation sich weiterentwickeln (a) separable prefixed verb (sein+)entwickelt (a) (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘increase’ steigern labile verb steige(r)n (a/c) equipollent alternation alike erheben,erhöhen,erweitern (c) inseparable prefixed verbs aufsteigen, zunehmen (a) separable prefixed verbs (sein+)gestiegen (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘improve’ (sich) verbessern (a/c) anticausative alternation ‘decrease’ senken / sinken (c/a) equipollent alternation reduzieren (a/c) inseparable prefixed labile verb fallen (a) vermindern, verringern (c) inseparable prefixed verbs

abheben, abnehmen (a) separable prefixed verbs (sein+)gesunken, gefallen, (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) zurückgegangen ‘break’ brechen (a/c) labile verb zerbrechen (a/c) labile inseparable prefixed verb aufbrechen (c) separable prefixed verb kaput gehen (a)/kaput machen (c) phrasal verbs (sein+)gebrochen, zerbrochen (a) (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) (sein+)kaputt (sein+) adjective/adverb? ‘crack’ knacken, brechen (a/c) labile verbs (sich) brechen (a/c) anticausative alternation (zer)brechen (c/a) causative alternation platzen, reißen (a) knacken (4) (sein+)geknackt, gebrochen, (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) brechen, zerbrochen (a) reißen (3) (sein+)rissig (sein+)adjective

‘rip’ reißen (a/c) labile verb zerreißen (a/c) labile inseparable prefixed verb zerissen, knacken (a) zerbrochen abreißen, aufreißen (c) separable prefixed verbs (3) (sein+)gerissen, zerrissen (a) (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘split’ (sich) spalten, (sich) teilen (a/c) anticausative alternations brechen, knacken (a/c) labile verbs sich trennen (a) auseinanderreißen (c) phrasal verb (sein+)gespalten, zerbrochen, (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) zerrissen (a) ‘tear’ reißen (a/c) labile verb (sich) reißen, (auf)reißen (c/a) causative alternation

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knacken (a) (sein+)gerissen, zerrissen (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘burn’ verbrennen (a/c) labile inseparable prefixed verb (ver)brennen (c/a) causative alternation

anbrennen (a) separable prefixed verb (sein+)verbrannt (a) (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘play’ spielen (a/c) labile verb (ab)spielen (a/c) anticausative separable prefixed verb ‘run’ ausführen (a/c) labile separable prefixed verb laufen, rennen (a) abspielen (c) separable prefixed verb laufenlassen (c) phrasal verb (sein+)beendet,gelaufen (a) (sein+) past participle:f(adjective) (sein+)vorbei (a) (sein+) adverb (sein+) im Gange (a) (sein+) prepositional phrase ‘move’ verschieben (a/c) labile inseparable prefixed verb

(sich) bewegen (a/c) anticausative alternation ‘download’ herunterladen (a/c) labile separable prefixed verb German has more variation in ergative strategies than English as we observe lability, anticausative, causative and equipollent alternations. Table 21 shows that these strategies can be complementary or concurrent, nonetheless if frequency is taken into account, then complementary use of strategies seems to be most typical, especially with aspectual verbs. Lability is the main strategy in this selection but anticausative alternations are also important in German with verbs of change. With many verbs, one strategy seems to be clearly more applied than the others, supporting the lexicogrammatical view of interdependency between lexis and grammar.

Just like in English and as an alternative for an anticausative labile verb, one can frequently observe the use of a syncretism in German consisting of sein (~E be), mostly in the simple present, followed by a past participle functioning as an adjective. This form is frequently used as a perfective alternative for most meanings of this selection, independent of the concurrent strategies, e.g. verbs that take the sich clitic in the intransitive clause do not take it with the past participle. I keep track of the sein + f(adj) showing up in translations with number of occurrences of past participles (first count in the last column) and other formations (second count in the last column).

Table 22 - Common German ergative strategies in this selection : Meaning # Labile # Anticausative # Causative # Equipollent # Sein alternations alternations alternations alternations +f(adj) ‘open’ 1 1,1 ‘close’ 1 1,0 ‘shut’ 1 1 1,0 ‘begin’ 1 ‘start’ 2 ‘stop’ 2 2,0 ‘end’ 1 4,3 ‘finish’ 1 4,4 ‘continue’ 1 1,0 ‘change’ 2 2 ‘turn’ 4 2,0 ‘develop’ 1 1,0 ‘increase’ 1 1,0 ‘improve’ 1

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‘decrease’ 1 3,0 ‘break’ 2 2,1 ‘crack’ 2 1 1 3,1 ‘rip’ 2 2,0 ‘split’ 2 2 3,0 ‘tear’ 1 2 2,0 ‘burn’ 1 1 1,0 ‘play’ 1 1 run 1 2,2 ‘move’ 1 1 ‘download’ 1 total meanings 16 11 5 2 18 total verb pairs 23 16 6 2 36 rank 1 2 3 4 - I didn’t rank the V / sein+f(adj) alternation since it is only frequently used as an alternative for perfective tenses and as such more limited in its frequency than simple present. On the other hand, it represents a valid anticausative use, that seems to be more common in German than the anticausative use of the regular perfect with haben (~E have) as auxiliary.

3. French

As we can perceive in table 23, French uses the se clitic in anticausative clauses with many verbs in all tenses. Nevertheless, many other verbs exhibit lability and not seldom meanings can be expressed both with ‘se-verbs’ and labile verbs.

Table 23– French dataset VPs from eStrategies table through QeSynonyms French query Meaning Synonyms / alternatives Type ∩ (c)ausative/(a)nticausative ‘open’ (s’)ouvrir (a/c) anticausative alternation

s’(+être)ouvert se+(être+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘close’ (se)fermer (a/c) anticausative alternation (être+)fermé (être+) past participle:f(adjective) (se)fermer ‘shut’ (se) fermer (a/c) anticausative alternation (être+)fermé (être+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘begin’ commencer (a/c) labile verb ‘start’ commencer, démarrer (a/c) labile verbs commencer démarrer (c) ‘stop’ (s’)arrêter (a/c) anticausative alternation cesser (a) cesser (le travail), quitter (son collocates employ) (c) (être+)arrêté (être+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘end’ (se) terminer (a/c) anticausative alternation prendre fin (a) / mettre fin à (c) phrasal verbs finir (tr) (être+)fini, terminé (a) (être+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘finish’ finir (a/c) labile verb (se) terminer (a/c) anticausative alternation prendre fin (a) / mettre fin à (c) phrasal verbs arrêter (c) (être)fini,terminé, fait (a) (être+) past participle:f(adjective) s’(être+)achevé (a) se+(être+) past participle:f(adjective)

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‘continue’ continuer (a/c) labile verb (se) poursuivre (a/c) anticausative alternation s’(être)+poursuivi (a) se+(être+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘change’ changer (a/c) labile verb ‘turn’ changer (a/c) labile verb tourner (a) / faire tourner (c) causative alternation

transformer (c) (être+)retourné (être+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘develop’ (se) développer (a/c) anticausative alternation

s’(être)développé (a) se+(être+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘increase’ augmenter (a/c) labile verb monter (a), soulever (c) s’(être)levé (a) se+(être+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘improve’ (s’)améliorer anticausative alternation

s’(être)amélioré se+(être+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘decrease’ baisser, diminuer (a/c) labile verbs tomber (a) / faire tomber (c) causative alternation decliner, décoller (a) faire baiser, descender, tomber (c) reduire (c) (être) abaissé, tombé (a) (être+) past participle:f(adjective) (être) en baisse (a) (être+) prepositional phrase ‘break’ (se) briser (a/c) anticausative alternation casser (c) (être+)cassé (être+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘crack’ craquer (a/c) labile verb (se) briser, (se) fendre (a/c) anticausative alternations craquer (a) / faire craquer (c) causative alternation éclater (a), se fissurer (c) (être+)cassé, fêlé, déchiré (a) (être+) past participle:f(adjective) s’(être)fendu, fissure (a) se+(être+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘rip’ déchirer (a/c) labile verb (se) déchirer (a/c) anticausative alternation (se)briser, cracquer (a), se casser, se romper, (se) (a), arracher (c) (être)dechiré, cassé (a) (être+) past participle:f(adjective) dechirer (3) s’(être)déchiré, cassé (a) se+(être+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘split’ (se) diviser,briser,fendre (a/c) anticausative alternations déchirer, partager (c) (être) divisé, fendu (a) (être+) past participle:f(adjective) s’(être) se+(être+) past participle:f(adjective) brisé,cassé,divisé,fendu,separé (a) ‘tear’ (se) déchirer anticausative alternation craquer (a) (être)déchiré (a) (être+) past participle:f(adjective) s’(être)déchiré (a) se+(être+) past participle:f(adjective) ‘burn’ brûler (a/c) labile verb (être)brûlé (a) (être+) past participle:f(adjective) (être)en feu (a) (être+) prepositional phrase ‘play’ jouer (a/c) labile verb jouer (a) /faire jouer (c) causative alternation (être)joué (être+) past participle:f(adjective) (être)en jeu (être+) prepositional phrase ‘run’ courir (a/c) labile verb (s’)exécuter anticausative alternation tourner (a)/faire tourner (c) causative alternation

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fonctionner (a) (être)fini, terminé (a) (être+) past participle:f(adjective) s’(être)exécuté se+(être+) past participle:f(adjective ‘move’ bouger (a/c) labile verb (se) déplacer anticausative alternation

s’(être)déplacé se+(être+) past participle:f(adjective) (être)en mouvement (être+) prepositional phrase ‘download’ télécharger labile verb

(être)téléchargé (être+) past participle:f(adjective) At first sight, German and French strategies are similar : they both have a strong anticausative strategy with a reflexive clitic, a comparable level of lability and a ‘be + f(adj) perfective’ alternative. However, the anticausative strategy is stronger in French and the ‘be+ f(adj) perfective’ also has an alternative conserving the reflexive clitic of anticausative verbs. Table 22 visualizes these features.

Table 24 - Common French ergative strategies in this selection Meaning # Labile # Anticausative # Causative # Equipollent # être # se+être alternations alternations alternations alternations +f(adj) +f(adj) ‘open’ 1 1,0 ‘close’ 1 1,0 ‘shut’ 1 1,0 ‘begin’ 1 ‘start’ 2 ‘stop’ 1 1,0 ‘end’ 1 1 2,0 ‘finish’ 1 1 1 3,0 1,0 ‘continue’ 1 1 1,0 ‘change’ 1 ‘turn’ 1 1,0 ‘develop’ 1 1,0 ‘increase’ 1 1,0 ‘improve’ 1 1,0 ‘decrease’ 2 1 2,1 ‘break’ 1 1,0 ‘crack’ 1 2 1 3,0 2,0 ‘rip’ 1 1 2,0 2,0 ‘split’ 3 2,0 5,0 ‘tear’ 1 ‘burn’ 1 1,1 ‘play’ 1 1 1,1 run 1 1 1 2,0 1,0 ‘move’ 1 1 0,1 1,0 ‘download’ 1 1,0 total 14 16 5 2 16 10 meanings total verb 16 19 5 2 24 16 pairs rank 2 1 3 4

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4. Dutch

Table 25 presents all VP synonyms that emerged in the datasets, grouped by morpho-syntactical formation and type of alternation, including a cross-section (∩).

Table 25 – Dutch dataset VPs from eStrategies table through QeSynonyms Dutch query Meaning Synonyms / alternatives Type ∩ (c)ausative/(a)nticausative ‘open’ opengaan,openstaan (a)/opendoen(c) separable prefixed verbs in suppletive alternation

openen (c) (zijn) geopend, opengegaan (a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) ‘close’ sluiten (a/c) labile verb (af)sluiten (c/a) causative alternation (zijn)gesloten (a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) (zijn)dicht (a) (zijn+)adverb sluiten (a/c) labile verb ‘shut’ sluiten (zich)sluiten (a/c) anticausative alternation dichtgaan(a)/dichtdoen(c) separable prefixed verbs in suppletive alternation (zijn)gesloten (a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) (zijn)dicht (a) (zijn+)adverb ‘begin’ beginnen (a/c) labile verb beginnen met (c) V+preposition (zijn)begonnen (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) beginnen ‘start’ starten, beginnen (a/c) labile verbs beginnen met (c) V+preposition (zijn)begonnen (a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) ‘stop’ stoppen (a/c) labile verb stopzetten, tegenhouden (c) (zijn)gestopt (a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) ‘end’ eindigen (a/c) labile verb (be)ëindigen (c/a) causative alternation ophouden (a), afmaken,afronden (c) (zijn)beëindigd, afgelopen,voltooid (a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) (zijn)voorbij,af (a) (zijn+)adverb

(zijn)ten einde (a) (zijn+)idiomatic prepositional phrase (zijn) klaar met (c) (zijn+)adverb + prepositional phrase ‘finish’ eindigen (a/c) labile verb (be)ëindigen (c/a) causative alternation ophouden (a), afmaken, finishen, stoppen (c) (zijn)afgelopen (a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) (zijn)klaar (a) (zijn+)adverb ‘continue’ doorgaan,verdergaan(a)/voortzetten separable prefixed verbs in (c) suppletive alternation

doorgaan met (c) V+prepositional phrase (zijn)voortgezet (a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) ‘change’ veranderen (a/c) labile verb (zijn+)veranderd (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) ‘turn’ veranderen, draaien, keren (a/c) labile verbs veranderen (om)draaien (c/a) causative alternation (zijn)veranderd,(om)gekeerd (a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) ‘develop’ (zich)ontwikkelen (a/c) anticausative alternation

(zijn)ontwikkeld (a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective)

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‘increase’ stijgen, toenemen (a)/ verhogen (c) suppletive alternation

(zijn)gestegen, toegenomen (a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) ‘improve’ verbeteren (a/c) labile verb beter worden (a) phrasal verb (zijn)verbeterd (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) ‘decrease’ afnemen(a)/verlagen(c) suppletive alternation dalen, omlaaggaan, vallen (a) verminderen(c) (zijn) afgenomen, gedaald, verlaagd (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) (a) ‘break’ breken (a/c) labile verb openbreken (c) phrasal verb (zijn)gebroken (a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) (zijn)kapot(a) (zijn+)adverb/adjective ‘crack’ kraken (a/c) labile verb barsten, scheuren (a), breken (c) (zijn)gebarsten (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) ‘rip’ scheuren,breken (a/c) labile verbs (ver)scheuren (c/a) causative alternation uit elkaar scheuren (a) phrasal verb breken, (zijn)gescheurd, gebroken (a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) scheuren (zijn) kapot (a) (zijn+)adverb/adjective (3) ‘split’ splitsen (a/c) labile verb (zich)splitsen (a/c) anticausative alternation delen, splijten (c) (zijn)gespleten,verdeeld,gescheurd(a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) ‘tear’ scheuren, breken (a/c) labile verbs (ver)scheuren (c/a) causative alternation (ver)breken (a/c) anticausative alternation (zijn)gescheurd,gebarsten, (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) gekraakt,gebroken(a) ‘burn’ (ver)branden c/a) causative alternation in brand staan (a) phrasal verb (zijn)verbrand (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) ‘play’ spelen (a/c) labile verb (af)spelen (a/c) anticausative alternation (zijn)(af)gespeeld (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) ‘run’ lopen,draaien (a/c) labile verbs spelen (a), runnen, uitvoeren (c) (zijn)uitgevoerd,afgelopen (a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) (zijn)voorbij (zijn+)adverb ‘move’ bewegen (a/c) labile verb (zich)verplaatsen (a/c) anticausative alternation (zijn)verplaatst (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective) ‘download’ downloaden (a/c) labile verb

(zijn)gedownload (a) (zijn+)past participle:f(adjective)

After counting the occurrences of each strategy in table 25, we get an interesting and somewhat surprising view on Dutch strategies in table 26 : labile alternations can be exemplified with 19 out of 25 verb meanings, which is more than in French and German, but less than in English. This phenomenon is masked by concurrent use of either anticausative, causative or suppletive alternations. Although these last three strategies are secondary, only applied in 6 out of 25 verb meanings on average, all three together are equally strong. Dutch also takes a special position using

60 separable prefixed verbs in suppletive alternations, of which the ‘open’ use is prototypical, as it corresponds with ‘John opens the door. / The door opens’.

In correspondence with the previous languages and as an alternative for an anticausative labile verb, one can frequently observe the use of a syncretism in Dutch consisting of zijn (~E be), mostly in the simple present, followed by a past participle functioning as an adjective. This form is frequently used as a perfective alternative for most meanings of this selection. The frequency of use is high, higher than in English but on par with the use in German and French.

Table 26 - Common Dutch ergative strategies in this selection Meaning # Labile # Anticausative # Causative # Suppletive # zijn alternations alternations alternations alternations +f(adj) ‘open’ 2 2,0 ‘close’ 1 1 1,1 ‘shut’ 1 1 1 1,1 ‘begin’ 1 1,0 ‘start’ 2 1,0 ‘stop’ 1 1,0 ‘end’ 1 1 3,3 ‘finish’ 1 1 1,1 ‘continue’ 2 1,0 ‘change’ 1 1,0 ‘turn’ 3 1 2,0 ‘develop’ 1 1,0 ‘increase’ 2 2,0 ‘improve’ 1 1,0 ‘decrease’ 1 3,0 ‘break’ 1 1,1 ‘crack’ 1 1,1 ‘rip’ 2 1 2,1 ‘split’ 1 1 3,0 ‘tear’ 2 1 1 4,0 ‘burn’ 1 1,0 ‘play’ 1 1 2,0 run 2 2,1 ‘move’ 1 1 1,0 ‘download’ 1 1,0 total meanings 19 7 6 5 25 total verb pairs 25 7 6 8 40 rank 1

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5. Danish

Table 27 presents all VP synonyms that emerged in the Danish datasets, grouped by morpho- syntactical formation and type of alternation, including a cross-section (∩).

Table 27 – Danish dataset VPs from eStrategies table through QeSynonyms Danish query Meaning Synonyms / alternatives Type ∩ (c)ausative/(a)nticausative ‘open’ åbne (sig), åbne(s) (a/c) anticausative alternations

(være) åbnet (a) (være +)past participle:f(adjective) ‘close’ lukke (a/c) labile verb lukke(s) (a/c) anticausative alternation (være)lukket (a) (være +)past participle:f(adjective) lukke,lukke(s) ‘shut’ lukke (a/c) labile verb lukke(s) (a/c) anticausative alternation (være)lukket (a) (være +)past participle:f(adjective) ‘begin’ begynde (a/c) labile verb starte (a) (være) begyndt, startet (a) (være +)past participle:f(adjective) begynde, ‘start’ starte (a/c) starte begynde (a) (være) startet (a) (være +)past participle:f(adjective) ‘stop’ stoppe (a/c) labile verb afslutte (c) (være)stoppet (a) (være +)past participle:f(adjective) ‘end’ ende (a/c) labile verb (af)slutte (c/a) causative alternation (være)afsluttet (a) (være +)past participle:f(adjective) (være) færdig, forbi (a) (være +)adverb (af)slutte er (a) (være) [idiomatic] ‘finish’ (af)slutte (c/a) causative alternation afslutte(s) (a/c) anticausative alternation (være)afsluttet,gjort (a) (være +)past participle:f(adjective) (være) færdig, forbi,klar (a) (være +)adverb (være)færdig med (a) (være+)adverb+prepositional phrase er (a) (være) [idiomatic] ‘continue’ fortsætte (a/c) labile verb

(være)fortsat (a) (være +)past participle:f(adjective) ‘change’ (for)ændre (sig), ændre(s) (a/c) anticausative alternations skifte (c) (være)ændret (være+)udviklet ‘turn’ ændre (sig) (a/c) anticausative alternation ændre (sig) vende, dreje (a/c) labile verbs vende (om),(rundt) (c/a) causative alternations (være)vendt (være +)past participle:f(adjective) ‘develop’ udvikle (sig) (a/c) anticausative alternation

(være)udviklet (a) (være +)past participle:f(adjective) ‘increase’ øge(s) (a/c) anticausative alternation stige (a), hæve, rejse (a)

(være)steget (være +)past participle:f(adjective) (være)på vej op (være +)prepositional phrase ‘improve’ forbedre(sig),forbedre(s) (a/c) anticausative alternations (være+) forbedret (a) (være +)past participle:f(adjective) (være+) bedre (a) (være +)adverb/adjective falde (a/c) labile verb

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‘decrease’ (for)mindske,reducere, sænke(c) (være)faldet,reduceret,taget, (være +)past participle:f(adjective) sænket, (være) gået ned (a)

(være) på vej ned (være +)prepositional phrase (være)tabt (c) (være) mindre (a) (være +)adjective ‘break’ bryde (a/c) labile verb bryde (åbent) (c/a) causative alternation smadre (c) gå i stykker (a) V+prepositional phrase (være) brydt (være +)past participle:f(adjective) (være) ved at ødelægge (være +)idiomatic expression ‘crack’ sprænge (a/c) labile verb briste, revne, rive, tåre (a) brække, knække, krakke, smadre (c) (være) revet, revnet (a) (være +)past participle:f(adjective) (være) ved at briste (a) (være +)idiomatic expression ‘rip’ flå, rippe, rive (a/c) labile verbs rive(s) anticausative alternation sprække, tåre (a) brække, ødelægge, reve (op), splitte ad (c) (være) revet, ødelagt, brudt, (være +)past participle:f(adjective) flænset (a) (være+) revet fra hinanden, (være+) V + prepositional phrase revet i stykker (være+) ved at rive (være +)idiomatic expression ‘split’ splitte (a/c) labile verb splitte (sig), dele (sig) (a/c) anticausative alternations splitte (s) opdele (c) (være)delt, splittet (være +)past participle:f(adjective) ‘tear’ briste, flå, rive (a/c) labile verbs rive(s) anticausative alternation tåre (a) bryde, ødelægge, rippe, skære (c) gå i stykker (a) V+prepositional phrases reve i stykker, rive i stykker, rive fra hinanden (c) phrasal verbs splitte ad, tåre af (være) brækket, brudt, ødelagt, revet (a) (være +)past participle:f(adjective) (være)revet i stykker (være +)past participle:f(adjective) + prepositional phrase ‘burn’ brænde (a/c) labile verb brænde(s) (a/c) anticausative verb

(for)brænde (c/a) causative verb (være) brændt (være +)past participle:f(adjective) ‘play’ spille (a/c) labile verb spille(s) , (af)spilles (a/c) anticausative alternations ‘run’ køre (a/c) labile verb forgå, løbe (a) (være) afsluttet, gået, kørt, (være +)past participle:f(adjective) løbet (a) er (være) idiomatic expression

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‘move’ bevæge (sig) (a/c) anticausative alternation flytte (c) (være) flyttet (være +)past participle:f(adjective) ‘download’ downloade (a/c) labile verb downloade(s), hente(s) anticausative alternations (være) downloadet, hentet (være +)past participle:f(adjective)

In table 27 the individual occurrences per verb meaning can be observed. In table 28 the total number of alternations per verb and per meaning are counted.

In Danish the picture changes again since the labile and anticausative alternations both are concurrent on an equally high level, with causative alternations as a secondary alternative. These anticausative alternations themselves consist of two concurrent strategies, either inserting the sig clitic (comparable to se in French, sich in German and the marginal use of zich in Dutch in this context) or adding the passive -s suffix to the simple present tense of the verb.

Also in Danish, the use of være (~be) + past participle as an alternative for an anticausative labile verb, can be frequently observed. This form is frequently used as a perfective alternative for most meanings of this selection. The frequency of use is high, on par with the use in Dutch, German and French, to the extent that it is the main strategy in anticausative clauses in perfect tense in all languages except English.

Table 28 - Common Danish ergative strategies in this selection Meaning # Labile # Anticausative # Causative # Equipollent # være alternations alternations alternations alternations +f(adj) ‘open’ 2 1,0 ‘close’ 1 1 1,0 ‘shut’ 1 1 1,0 ‘begin’ 1 2,0 ‘start’ 1 1,0 ‘stop’ 1 1,0 ‘end’ 1 1 1,3 ‘finish’ 1 1 2,5 ‘continue’ 1 1,0 ‘change’ 2 1,0 ‘turn’ 2 1 2 1,0 ‘develop’ 1 1,0 ‘increase’ 1 1,1 ‘improve’ 2 1,1 ‘decrease’ 1 5,3 ‘break’ 1 1 1,1 ‘crack’ 1 2,1 ‘rip’ 3 1 4,3 ‘split’ 1 3 1,0 ‘tear’ 3 1 2,0 ‘burn’ 1 1 1 1,0 ‘play’ 1 2 run 1 4,1 ‘move’ 1 1,0 ‘download’ 1 2 2,0 total meanings 18 16 5 24 total verb pairs 23 23 6 39 rank 1 2 3

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3.2.2 Cross Linguistic Statistics

1. Basic strategies

In tables 29, 30 and 31 I present the counts of the observed strategies. In table 29 I confirm lability as the main English lexical strategy. Lability is also the main strategy in Dutch, Danish and German. Only in French the anticausative strategy with se insertion in the intransitive is at least as strong as the labile strategy.

As a consequence lability is the main strategy observed in the five languages of our comparison, anticausative alternations are clearly second and causative alternations are third. English is clearly unique in this comparison, showing barely any other strategy, where in the four other languages, three strategies are clearly present.

Table 29 – Basic ergative strategies as they occur cross-linguistically English German French Dutch Danish Labile 25 16 14 19 18 Anticausative 11 16 7 16 Causative 5 5 6 5 Equipollent 1 2 2 5 The way lability is implemented in ‘present perfect tense’ sheds new light on the labile alternation though : all languages show a ‘be auxiliary + past participle’ alternative in the anticausative clause, in which the past participle can be read as an adjective. Although this results in a syncretism with simple present passive voice, the active reading with an adjective expressing a perfective state preserves the lability of this alternation. Of course there is always a passive flavor involved in this construction, the expression of an event without an agent and with a subject/patient, but that might be just what the anticausative can be used for, namely the description of events that, without an instigator, are just happening by themselves or from an inner force or as an internal causation without explicit dynamics. If one accepts that, it is a small step to accept that the resultative, perfective state has come about as a result of the previous process and that the event has had no need of an agent to obtain the result. Simply put : If you accept that the door opens either by itself or due to an internal cause, then I suggest that the door has opened and the door is opened follows this same reasoning, with only a difference in aspect, namely the completion of the event vs the expression of the resulting state. If we reject to include this in a view of lexical ergativity, all doors opening through no external cause should be meticulously reevaluated in search of the factual cause of their change of state. Eventually, this discussion is all about how events are presented and not about the actual underlying facts, that often are unknown or irrelevant, or for specific reasons, preferably be covert. In any event, the count of ‘be+f(adj)’ occurrences in table 30 reveals that this use is general and cross-linguistically embedded.

Table 30 - ‘Be+f(adj) perfective’ alternatives cross-linguistically English German French Dutch Danish Meanings 13 18 21 25 24 Total 19 36 40 40 33 verbs

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As for the causative and anticausative alternations, table 31 summarizes the means to implement such strategies. Since we observed neither causative nor anticausative means in English identical labile verbs, there is no mention of corresponding constructions. Anticausative reflexive clitic insertion has been observed in the other four languages as a means to turn the event into a self- inflicted action. In French this is the main ergative strategy, that can be applied in all tenses. In German and Danish it is applied often in present tense but not for perfect tense. Danish additionally has an alternative, originating as a passive suffix, that is applied in simple present tense only, which definitely has a passive flavor to it, but without mentioning or implying an agent, thus functioning as an active anticausative clause in which the subject undergoes the action.

Although causativity is by default expressed by causative verbs, some intransitive verbs can be causativized by changing the morphosyntax of the root of the causative verb. In our dataset, German, Dutch and Danish implement this by adding a suffix as opposed to French, which prefers to add a verb functioning as a causative auxiliary, turning the verb into a phrasal construction.

Table 31 – Implementation of causative and anticausative alternations English German French Dutch Danish Anticausative 16 23 5 25 > 15 SICH clitic > 21 SE clitic > 1 ZICH clitic > 8 SIG clitic > 12 s-passive Causative 6 5 8 3 > 5 suffixed V > 4 phrasal V > 5 suffixed V 3 suffixed V

2. Cross-linguistic labile strategies

Table 32 – Meanings with cross-linguistic labile strategies in all languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘begin’ begin beginnen commencer beginnen begynde anfangen ‘start’ start starten démarrer starten starte begin beginnen commencer beginnen begynde ‘rip’ rip reißen déchirer scheuren rippe, rive tear tare, flå ‘crack’ crack knacken craquer kraken sprænge ‘play’ play spielen jouer spelen spille ‘run’ run ausführen courir draaien køre ‘download’ download herunterladen télécharger downloaden downloade

Table 32 is a subset of the eStrategies table in which only verb meanings and their cross-linguistic translation equivalents are retained that exhibit lability in all five languages. As I focused on frequency of use, we have to keep in mind that this only shows the verbs that are frequently used in this configuration. I do claim however, as this seems a logical extension, that an undetermined number of meanings can be expressed in a labile manner across the languages of this research. The verbs in table 33 on the next page are the first candidates to confirm this claim. If a labile alternative can be found for the mostly anticausative construction, then these verbs too can be added to the previous series.

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Table 33 - Meanings with cross-linguistic labile strategies in four languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘close’ close schließen (se) fermer AC sluiten lukke shut ‘stop’ stop stoppen (s’) arrêter AC stoppen stoppe anhalten ‘continue’ continue fortsetzen continuer voortzetten (C) / verdergaan (AC) ‘turn’ turn (sich) ändern AC changer veranderen dreje (around) AC (sich) wenden AC draaien ‘change’ change wechseln changer veranderen ændre (sig) AC ‘break’ break brechen (se) briser AC breken bryde ‘burn’ burn verbrennen brûler (ver)branden C brænde ‘move’ move verschieben bouger bewegen bevæge (sig) AC

3. Cross-linguistic anticausative strategies

Table 34 confirms the existence of anticausative strategies across German, French, Dutch and Danish. Interesting to notice is that while German and French clearly have a preference for anticausative constructions, Dutch rather freely uses either anticausative or labile alternations. Danish takes this a step further with often allowing three options in anticausative clauses, namely either a labile verb, a sig insertion or an s- suffix.

Table 34 – Meanings with cross-linguistic anticausative strategies in most languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘open’ open L (sich) öffnen AC (s’)ouvrir AC openen (C) / åbne (sig) AC open (up) AC opengaan (AC) åbne(s) AC ‘close’ close L (sich) schliessen AC (se) fermer AC (zich) sluiten AC/L lukke(s) AC/L ‘shut’ shut L (sich) schliessen AC (se) fermer AC (zich) sluiten AC/L lukke(s) AC/L ‘develop’ develop L (sich) entwickeln AC (se) developer AC (zich) ontwikkelen AC udvikle (sig) AC ‘improve’ improve L (sich) verbessern AC (s’) améliorer AC verbeteren L forbedre (sig) AC forbedre(s) AC ‘split’ split L (sich) spalten AC (se) diviser AC (zich) splitsen AC/L splitte (sig) L/AC splitte(s) AC dele (sig) AC ‘play’ play L (ab)spielen AC (faire) jouer C (af)spelen AC (af)spille(s) AC ‘move’ move L (sich) bewegen AC (se) déplacer AC (zich) verplaatsen AC bevæge (sig) AC bouger L

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4. Cross-linguistic resultative strategies

Table 35 exemplifies the importance of the cross-linguistic resultative strategies in present perfect tense using an equivalent of the auxiliary be with a past participle functioning as an adjective. 13 out of 25 verb meanings reveal widespread application of this construction.

Table 35 – Meanings with cross-linguistic resultative strategies in most languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘open’ open / öffnen / ouvrir / openen / åbne / (be) open (sein) offen s’(être) ouvert (zijn) open (være) åbnet (sein) geöffnet (zijn) geopend ‘close’ close or shut schließen / fermer / sluiten / Lukke / (be) closed (sein) geschlossen (être) fermé (zijn) gesloten (være)lukket ‘end’ end or finish / enden / terminer / eindigen / (af)slutte / ‘finish’ (be) finished (sein) beendet (être) terminé (zijn) beëindigd (være) afsluttet ‘continue’ continue fortsetzen / poursuivre / voortzetten fortsætte (sein) fortgesetzt ‘s (être) poursuit (zijn) voortgezet (være) fortsat ‘turn’ drehen / tourner / keren / vende / (sein) umgedreht (être) retourné (zijn) omgekeerd (være) vendt ‘develop’ entwickeln / developer / ontwikkelen udvikle / (sein) entwickelt s’ (être) developé (zijn) ontwikkeld (være) udviklet ‘break’ break / brechen / casser / breken bryde (be) broken (sein) gebrochen (être) cassé (zijn) gebroken (være) brydt ‘rip’ rip or tear / reißen / déchirer / scheuren / reve / (be) ripped (sein) gerissen (être) déchiré (zijn) gescheurd (være) revet (be) torn ‘split’ split / spalten / fendre / splijten / splitte or dele (be) split (sein) gespalten (être) fendu (zijn) gespleten (være) splittet (være) delt ‘crack’ crack / knacken / fissurer / (doen) barsten / briste (be) cracked (sein) geknackt s’(être) fissuré (zijn) gebarsten (være) bristet ‘burn’ burn / verbrennen brûler verbranden brænde (be) burned (sein) verbrannt (être) brûlé (zijn) verbrand (være) brændt ‘run’ execute / laufen lassen or exécuter / uitvoeren køre (be) executed ausführen / (être) exécuté (zijn) uitgevoerd (være) kørt (sein) gelaufen (sein) ausgeführt ‘download’ download / herunterladen / télécharger / downloaden / downloade / (be) downloaded (sein) (être) téléchargé (zijn) gedownload (være) heruntergeladen downloadet

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5. Cross-linguistic strategies matched with semantic clusters Although all strategies appear in every semantic cluster, and lability is clearly most representative, I observe tendencies in table 36 that may need further research. 1. In the first cluster ‘open’ and ‘close’ show more diversity in possible strategies than ‘shut’, where translation equivalents mainly function in anticausative alternations. 2. In the second cluster only ‘begin’ and ‘continue’ exhibit frequent use of the resultative alternative. Frequent use of anticausative alternations is limited to the translation equivalents of ‘stop’, ‘end’ and ‘finish’ in French. ‘Start’, ’stop’ and ‘end’ only show one frequent ergative strategy per language. 3. In the third cluster ‘change’, ‘improve’, ‘increase’ and ‘decrease’ show only one frequent ergative strategy per language while ‘turn’ and ‘develop’ mostly show two alternatives in all languages. 4. In the fourth cluster lability in present tense in combination with resultative expressions in anticausatives is the major application. 5. In the fifth cluster the anticausative alternation of ‘move’ and ‘play’ verbs stands out as opposed to the labile/resultative alternations of ‘run’ and ‘download’.

Table 36 – Summary of cross-linguistic strategies matched with semantic clusters Meaning Semantic Semantic English German French Dutch Danish Strategies group cluster ‘open’ 1 1 L,AC,R AC, R AC,R S,R AC,R 5R > 4AC > 1L,1S ‘close’ 1 2 L,R L, AC,R AC,R AC,L,R AC,L,R 5R > 4AC,4L ‘shut’ 1 2 L AC AC AC,L AC,L 4AC > 3L ‘begin’ 2 3 L,R L,R L,R L,R L,R 5L,5R ‘start’ 2 3 L L L L L 5L ‘stop’ 2 4 L L AC L L 4L > 1AC ‘end’ 2 4 L C AC L L 3L > 1AC,1C ‘finish’ 2 4 L C AC,L L,C C 3L,3C > 1AC ‘continue’ 2 5 L L,R L,R S,R L,R 4L,4R > 1S ‘change’ 3 6 L L L L AC 4L > 1AC ‘turn’ 3 6 L,AC AC,R L,R L,R L,R 4L,4R > 1AC ‘develop’ 3 7 L AC,R AC,R L,R AC,R 4L > 3AC ‘increase’ 3 8 L S L S AC 2L,2S > 1AC ‘improve’ 3 8 L AC AC L AC 3AC > 2L ‘decrease’ 3 9 L E L S L 3L > 1E,1S ‘break’ 4 10 L,R L,R AC,R L,R L,R 5R > 4L > 1AC ‘crack’ 4 10 L,R L,R L,R L,R L,R 5L,5R ‘rip’ 4 10 L,R L,R L,R L,R L,R 5L,5R ‘split’ 4 10 L,R AC,R AC,R AC,L,R AC,L,R 5R > 4AC > 3L ‘tear’ 4 10 L L AC L,AC,C L,AC 4L > 3AC > 1C ‘burn’ 4 11 L,R L,R L,R C,R L,R 5R > 4L > 1C ‘play’ 5 12 L L,AC L L,AC L,AC 5L > 3AC ‘run’ 5 12 L,R L,R L,R L,R L,R 5L,5R ‘move’ 5 13 L L,AC L,AC L,AC AC 4L,4AC ‘download’ 5 14 L,R L,R L,R L,R L,R 5L,5R Labile 25 15 13 20 18 91 Anticaus. 2 8 12 5 10 37 Resultative 10 13 11 12 13 59 Causative 0 2 0 2 1 5 Conc.Str. 37 38 36 37 42 # Strategies Alternations: L=Labile, R=Resultative, AC=Anticausative, C=Causative, S=Suppletive Strategies in the last column are ranked according to occurrence cross-linguistically.

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3.2.3. Cross-linguistic structural interpretation

As source I use the SplitData v2 table containing all translation data in separate clauses. These data were processed, edited and moved to a comparative table in Appendix 2, pages 12-37, for further observation, comparison and analysis. Since I started from the three English datasets as described in section 3.1 the structure of the original clauses was as follows :

Table 37 – Clause structure of the original English clauses Dataset Present Transitive clause NP VP NP Someone something 1 Perfect Intransitive clause NP VP Something Simple Transitive clause NP VP NP Someone < verb in simple present> something Present Intransitive clause NP VP Something freq.medium 2 Perfect Intransitive clause NP VP freq.medium Simple Transitive clause NP VP NP {he,she} freq.medium Present Intransitive clause NP VP freq.medium coll.medium 3 Perfect Intransitive clause NP VP coll.medium Simple Transitive clause NP VP NP {Maria,Martin < verb in simple present> coll.medium Present Intransitive clause NP VP coll.medium

NP VP NP = structure of all original English transitive clauses. NP VP = structure of all original English intransitive clauses.

In this table the following NPs are observed :

The subject of the original English intransitive clause and the object of the original English transitive clause is either {something, freq.medium,coll.medium}. The subject of the original English intransitive clause is either {someone, {he,she}, {Maria,Martin}}

1. Structural Variation in Transitive clauses

1.1 Aspect and tense

Although I started from only two tenses in English, simple present and present perfect, in translation and back translation this generated more tenses in all languages since there is no one-to-one relationship between tenses in different languages. The following tenses and constructions were rendered in the transitive clauses:

1. Simple present and its equivalents in German (Präsens), French (Le Présent), Dutch (Onvoltooid Tegenwoordige Tijd) and Danish (Nutid). 2. Present continuous in English and its equivalents in the other languages. 3. Present perfect and its equivalents in German (Perfekt), French (Le Passé Composé), Dutch (Voltooid Tegenwoordige Tijd) and Danish (Førnutid). 4. Simple past in English and its equivalents in the other languages.

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Simple present and its equivalents in the other languages are used for {general states, events, habits} and actions in the present time that do not take long in English while in the other languages it basically does not matter how long the actions takes.

In English the present continuous, expressing an explicit progressive aspect, is used for all actions that take place now while in the meantime taking some time. As just mentioned, the other languages can still use their simple present equivalent (see examples 42a-e).

(42a) E Maria {is playing, plays} a song. (42b) G Maria spielt ein Lied. (42c) F Maria joue une chanson. (42d) N Maria speelt een liedje. (42e) D Maria spiller en sang.

All these clauses can refer to the same situation. If a progressive aspect needs to be expressed, either a fitting construction (see examples 43a-c) or a suitable adverbial (e.g. a translation equivalent for ‘now’, ’presently’ etc.) can be used.

(43a) F Martin est en train de télécharger le fichier. Martin is in process of download the file ~ Martin is downloading the file.

(43b) D Han er ved at afslutte jobbet. He is to the point or process to finish the job ~ He is finishing the job.

(43c) N Zij is het process aan het verbeteren. She is the process at/in (the process) the improving ~ She is improving the process.

Examples 44a-e include adverbials or explicit constructions as applied to the examples 42a-e. While all languages can add temporal adverbials, especially Dutch and French frequently use explicit progressive constructions. In contrast, German and Danish can mostly do without these constructions.

(44a) E Maria is playing a song now. (44b) G Maria spielt jetzt ein Lied. Maria is playing now a song. (44c) F Maria est en train de jouer une chanson. Maria is in process of playing a song (44d) N Maria is een liedje aan het spelen. Maria is a song at playing (44e) D Maria spiller en sang i dag. Maria is playing a song today

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Translating back to English renders both simple present and present continuous since the machine translation for none of the source languages has a context or a clue to decide on the aspect to be used in English, so the main factor is probably the frequency of occurrence of similar clauses in the datasets used by the system.

According to grammar the present perfect and its equivalents are used in all languages for events that have begun in the past and have taken until now, especially if you want to express that this past action has a present result (see examples 45a-e).

(45a) E She has broken the window. (45b) G Sie hat das Fenster gebrochen. (45c) F Elle a cassé la fenêtre. (45d) N Ze heeft het raam gebroken. (45e) D Hun har brudt vinduet.

In all cases, the window is broken now as a result of it breaking before.

Although this study started with present perfect clauses, it rendered many simple past equivalents. This is a consequence of the fact that all languages except English can use their ‘present perfect’ as an alternative for simple past in English. In back translation this generates both ‘simple pasts’ and ‘present perfects’ in all languages, including English. Figure 6 visualizes this :

Step 1 > Step 2 > Step 3 Source Translation 1 Translation 2 (Back translation) E Present perfect G, F, N, D ‘present perfect’ E, G, F, N, D ‘present perfect’ or or G, F, N, D ‘simple past’ E, G, F, N, D ‘simple past’

Figure 6 -- Rendering of tenses in MT

Of course, depending on the specific context, since all languages can express both aspects, there will be preferences for using either one or the other, but if frequency is added to this equation, this frequency study confirms ‘present perfect’ is used more often especially in French and also in German, Dutch and Danish while ‘simple past’ is present more frequently in English. Moreover, English has strict grammatical rules obliging the use of either simple past or present perfect while German, Dutch and Danish have less strict rules and French without specific context outright prefers ‘present perfect’ (Passé Composé) over ‘simple past’ (Imparfait), which clearly shows in the data. To build present perfect English always uses have as auxiliary while the other languages can also use be with a limited number of verbs. In this selection be as auxiliary in active present perfect transitive-causative clauses is singular. The only verb licensed by the data of the translation sets is beginnen (English begin) in Dutch (see example 46).

(46) N Iemand is het werk begonnen. someone has the job started ~ Someone has started work.

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Table 38 summarizes the tense uses of transitive clauses discussed in this section.

Yellow highlights = one-word tense Green highlights = ‘have’-auxiliary + past participle Blue highlights = ‘be’-auxiliary + present participle

Table 38 – Summary of tense use in the transitive clauses of this research. source : Present Perfect Simple Present language: Simple past Present Perfect Present Continuous English Simple Present (and adverbials1) (and adverbials2) (and adverbials3) Präteritum or Perfekt or Präsens German Präsens Perfekt Präteritum (or construction) Le Présent French Passé Composé Passé Composé Le Présent or construction OTT47 Dutch OVT45 or VTT46 VTT or OVT OTT or construction Datid Førnutid Nutid Danish Nutid or Førnutid or Datid (or construction) This table is composed on the basis of the observed tenses and their formation and the emergence of alternate constructions.

1.2 Syntax

Since all transitive clauses in this research started from English [NP VP NP] clauses and all languages in this research by default use a corresponding construction, structural variation in transitive clauses is fairly limited. A simple present example clause in which we see word-by-word translation exemplifies this :

(47a) E Someone opens something. (47b) G Jemand öffnet etwas. (47c) F Quelqu’un ouvre quelque chose. (47d) N Iemand opent iets. (47e) D Nogen åbner noget.

The default construction is [Subject + Verb + Object] if a single-word verb is used. With phrasal verbs this becomes [Subject + Verb1 + Object + Verb2] in which Verb1 is the verbal root and Verb2 the verbal particle. Although the majority of verbs of all languages in this thesis are single-word ones and all languages also have phrasal verbs, phrasal verbs are more common in Dutch and German, which is confirmed by the data of this research (see examples 48a-b).

(48a) G Er hält das Auto an. he stops the car -

(48b) N Hij deed de deur open. he opens the door

45 Onvoltooid Verleden Tijd, comparable to simple past. 46 Voltooid Tegenwoordige Tijd, comparable to present perfect. 47 Onvoltooid Tegenwoordige Tijd, comparable to simple present. 73

‘Present perfect’ is built correspondingly in all languages. In each case have (or a translation equivalent) + past participle is used (see examples 49a-e).

(49a) E Somebody has opened something. (49b) G Jemand hat etwas geöffnet. (49c) F Quelqu’un a ouvert quelque chose. (49d) N Iemand heeft iets geopend. (49e) D Nogen har åbnet noget.

The default construction in English, French and Danish is [Subject + Auxiliary +Past Participle + Object] while in German and Dutch we use [Subject + Auxiliary + Object + Past Participle]. In German and Dutch this split construction is used consistently with phrasal verbs as well (see examples 50a-b)

(50a) G Er hat das Auto angehalten. he has the car stopped ~ He has stopped the car.

(50b) N Hij heeft de deur opengedaan. he has the door opened ~ He has opened the door.

In consequence of the grammar described in the previous paragraphs, translating [NP VP NP] clauses mainly render [NP VP NP] clauses and a fair number of [NP V1 NP V2] clauses in German and Dutch. Still, a limited number of alternative constructions are observed including replacing a direct object by either a prepositional object (51a-d), a to-infinitive (52f) or a present participle (52e), or replacing a VP by a verbal phrase with a different construction. Moreover, replacing the transitive clause by an intransitive (active or passive) clause, by a predicative ‘be’-clause or by a passive clause (with or without a ‘by-clause’) can be options too, especially if the instigator is vague or unimportant. One could argue these last grammatical, pragmatic user changes preserve only (most of) the message but sacrifice the grammar and thus cannot be considered transitive alternatives. I do not include them here in the discussion of the transitive-causative strategies but they get the proper attention in the intransitive-anticausative part.

(51a) G Sie hat mit dem Projekt begonnen. she has with the project started

(51b) N Ze is met het project begonnen. she is with the project started ~ She has started the project.

(52c) D Han er begyndt på noget. (52d) E He has started with something. ~ He started something.

(52e) E She started working. (52f) G Sie fing an zu arbeiten. she started to work ~ She started (the) work.

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Table 39 provides an overview of all VP occurrences observed in the transitive clauses. The following features can be observed :

1. All meanings in our selection can be expressed in transitive-causative clauses both in simple present and present perfect tense in all languages studied.

2. Insertion of a reflexive clitic is uncommon in transitive-causative clauses and only occurs in German and French. The occurrences relate to events that involve one’s own body (see 53a- b examples on the next page).

-- (observations continue on the next page)

Table 39 -- Overview of all VP occurrences in the transitive clauses ‘Simple present’ alternatives ‘Present Perfect’ alternatives Meaning ASP RSP APC SPP SPV APP APA BPP RBP PPP PPV PSP PSV ‘open’ EGFND E EGFND EGND ‘close’ EGFND E EGFND EGND ‘shut’ EGFND E EGFND EGND ‘begin’ EGFND GF EGFND EGFD EGD ND NGD EGFND N GND ‘end’ EGFND F EGFND EGND D DF ‘start’ EGFND E GF EGFND EGFD EGD ND NGD EGFND N GND ‘stop’ EGFND E D ND EGFND EGD N GF ‘continue’ EGFND E N N EGFND EGND N D FN ‘finish’ EGFND E N D EGFND EGD EGFND ‘turn’ EGFND E EGFND EGND ‘change’ EGFND E NF EGFND ED N N ‘develop’ EGFND E FN D EGFND ED ‘increase’ EGFND E EGFND EGND ‘decrease’ EGFND E EGFND EGND ‘improve’ EGFND E N EGFND EGND ‘break’ EGFND F E F D EGFND EGND F ‘rip’ EGFND GF E F EGFND EGND ‘split’ EGFND E EGFND EGND ‘crack’ EGFND GF E D EGFND EGND ‘tear’ EGFND G E EGFND EGND GHF ‘burn’ EGFDN E EGFND EGD ‘play’ EGFND E EGFND EGFND ‘run’ EGFND E EGFND ED ‘move’ EGFND E EGFND END ‘download’ EGFND E FN EGFND ED Count 25 25 The abbreviations in the column headings refer to specific tenses used.

ASP Active Simple Present RSP Reflexive Simple Present APC Active Present Continuous SPP Simple Present + PP APP Active Present Perfect (have) SPV Simple Present + VP APA Active Simple Past RBP Reflexive Present Perfect (be) BPP Active Present Perfect (be) PPP Present Perfect + PP PSP Simple Past + PP PPV Present Perfect + VP PSV Simple Past + VP EGFND English, German, French, Dutch, Danish

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--- (observations continued from the previous page)

3. English can express present time action in an explicit progressive way using a present continuous. Progression in the present is not expressed by a verbal aspect in the other languages, unless by a special purpose construction, adverbials or context (see examples 42- 44).

4. [NP VP PP] clauses can replace [VP NP VP] clauses in a specific context, in this selection the context is work, and this mostly with aspectual verbs. There are some occurrences in French (54b), German (54a) and Dutch (54c-d).

5. [NP VP] clauses can replace [VP NP VP] clauses in specific contexts with aspectual verbs in all languages (see examples 55a-e). Such expressions, in our selection mainly related to work, are frequently used but are beyond the scope of our study of transitive clauses since they involve a valency reduction.

6. Although grammars in all five languages state rules for choosing between present perfect or simple past tense, in our datasets, that lack a temporal context and do not include adverbials of time, translations are rendered on the basis of the frequency of use of tenses in the linked translation pairs, thus delivering rather randomly either present perfect or simple past, except for French, where by default Passé Composé (‘present perfect’) is rendered. Simple past seems to be preferred only in English and French with a limited number of verbs, but as this is not the focus of the current research I do not investigate this further.

(53a) G Martin { sich eine Rippe, hat sich eine Rippe gebrochen}. (53b) F Martin (se casse, s’est cassé} une côte. ~ Martin {break, broke} a rib.

(54a) G Sie {begann mit der Arbeit, hat mit der Arbeit begonnen}. ~ She has started the work.

(54b) F Maria se met au travail. ~ Maria starts (the) work.

(54c) N Maria is begonnen met het project. ~ Maria has started the project.

(54d) N Ze gaat door met het werk. ~ She continues the work.

(55a) E She begins to work. (55b) G Sie beginnt zu arbeiten. (55c) F Elle commence à travailler. (55d) N Ze begint te werken. (55e) D Hun begynder at arbejde. ~ She begins (the) work.

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2. Structural Variation in Intransitive clauses

The intransitive clauses show much more variation than the transitive clauses. Not only all variants discussed in 1.1 aspect and tense reappear, but additionally, there are also active and less active variants.

2.1 Aspect, tense and voice variation

According to functional linguistics, grammar and lexis are situated on a cline. This seems especially true when we have to decide whether an event or action is active, dynamic, instigated by an agent, causal and causative or inchoative or rather less active, less dynamic, rather descriptive, undergoing the action, patientlike, agentless, in a certain state or outright passive with or without an agent. In this section I link grammatical and lexical features in order to produce a sensible categorization.

Although I started from only two tenses in English, simple present and present perfect, in translation and back translation this again generated more tenses in all languages. The following tenses and constructions were rendered in the intransitive clauses:

1. Active Simple present and its equivalents in German (Präsens), French (Le Présent), Dutch (Onvoltooid Tegenwoordige Tijd) and Danish (Nutid). All subjects are patients undergoing the action and this use is common in all languages.

(56a) E Work begins. (56b) G Die Arbeit beginnt. (56c) F Le travail commence. (56d) N Het werk begint. (56e) D Arbejdet begynder.

2. ‘Reflexive’ Active Simple present and its equivalents in German, French, Dutch and Danish (see examples 57a-d and 58a-d) . This variant includes a verb with a reflexive clitic. This clitic suggests the subjects perform the actions as through an inner force, but since there often are translation equivalents or synonyms without clitics, this must only be a suggestion, so in the end the subjects still are patients undergoing the actions.

(57a) G Die Arbeit entwickelt sich. (57b) F Le travail se développe. (57c) N Het werk ontwikkelt zich. (57d) D Arbejdet udvikler sig. ~ The work develops.

(58a) G Das Atom {spaltet, teilt} sich. (58b) F L’atome se devise. (58c) N Het atoom {deelt zich, splitst {zich}}. (58d) D Atomet {deler sig, splitter, splittes} ~ The atom {divides, splits}.

The data license ‘develop’ and ‘split’ to use a reflexive clitic in intransitive clauses in all languages except English, but these are the only examples in this selection that work for all four languages. This variant is not often observed in ‘simple present’ tense in this selection. In ‘present tense’

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most often French takes the lead in this, with German second and Danish third. In Dutch it rarely occurs. Sometimes the same verb is either used with or without clitic. In French (59b, 59d, 59i) the clitic is used pre-verbally while in German (59a, 59c, 59h), Dutch and Danish (59f, 59k) the clitic takes a post-verbal position.

(59a) G Das Fenster öffnet sich. (59b) F La fenêtre s’ouvre. ~ The window opens

(59c) G Der Stein spaltet sich. (59d) F La pierre se fend. (59e) N De steen splijt. (59f) D Stenen deler sig. ~ The stone splits.

(59g) E The object {is moving, moves}. (59h) G Das Objekt bewegt sich. (59i) F L’objet {bouge, se déplace} (59j) N Het object beweegt. (59k) D Objektet bevæger sig.

3. ‘Simple present’ with s-suffix in Danish (60a-c). This is a feature only observed in Nord Germanic languages. The subject/patient clearly undergoes the action. Despite the passive flavor, especially for people who are aware of the origin of this suffix as a grammaticalization of the passive/reflexive clitic sig, this is a translation equivalent for active present tense and its equivalents in other languages. Moreover, it often has concurrent active nutid forms, either with the same verb or another one. The use is limited to a series of verbs, so not all verbs can take this s-suffix.

(60a) D Vinduet {lukker, lukkes}. ~ The window {closes, is closing}. (60b) D Arbejdet {startes, starter, begynder}. ~ Work starts. (60c) D Bilen {drejes, drejer}. ~ The car {turns, is turning}.

4. Active Present perfect and its equivalents with have as auxiliary in German (Perfekt), French (Le Passé Composé), Dutch (Voltooid Tegenwoordige Tijd) and Danish (Førnutid).

Where ‘present perfect’ in transitive clauses almost always uses have and its equivalents as its default auxiliary, this is much less the case in intransitive clauses in German, French, Dutch and Danish. In English have is still the default, also in intransitive clauses, but in the other languages there are not so many uses of have as an auxiliary without extra means to express anticausativity. The verbs in the examples on the next page (see examples 61a-v), mainly in French and German, are the only ones that license ‘just’ have + past perfect in the intransitive clauses of this research.

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(61a) F Quelque chose a fermé. ~ Something has closed. (61b) G Die Arbeit hat begonnen. (61c) F Le travail a commencé. ~ Work has begun. (61d) F Le travail a continué. ~ Work has continued. (61e) F Quelque chose a pris fin. ~ Something has ended. (61f) G Etwas hat aufgehört ~ Something has stopped. (61g) G Das Auto hat angehalten. ~ The car has stopped. (61h) F Quelque chose a fini. ~ Something has finished. (61i) G Das Auto hat gewendet. (61j) F La voiture a tourné. ~ The car has turned. (61k) F Ma vie a changé ~ My life has changed. (61l) G Die Arbeit hat {zugenommen, abgenommen} (61m) F Le travail a augmenté, diminué. ~ The work has {increased, decreased} (61n) G Etwas hat geknackt. (61o) F Quelque chose a craqué ~ Something has cracked. (61p) G Das Haus hat gebrannt. (61q) F La maison a brûlé. ~ The house has burned. (61r) G Ein Lied hat gespielt. (61s) F Une chanson a joué. (61t) N Een liedje heeft gespeeld. (61u) D En sang har spillet. ~ A song has played. (61v) F L’objet a bougé. (61w) N Het object heeft bewogen. ~ The object has moved.

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5. ‘Reflexive Active Present Perfect’ with haben/hebben/have (E have) as auxiliary in German (Perfekt), Danish (Førnutid) and Dutch (VTT).

It is a more important means in German to build anticausative intransitive clauses using present perfect. The data license the following verbs (see table 40) :

Table 40 – German ‘Reflexive’ Active Present Perfect with haben (E have) as auxiliary as observed in anticausative clauses. Meaning Verbs in German ‘open’ sich öffnen ‘close’ sich schließen ‘continue’ sich fortsetzen ‘turn’ sich drehen, sich wenden ‘change’ sich ändern, sich verändern ‘develop’ sich entwickeln ‘increase’ sich erhöhen ‘decrease’ sich verringern ‘improve’ sich verbessern ‘split’ sich spalten ‘move’ sich bewegen

There are three verbs in Danish (udvikle sig, ændre sig, splitte sig) and one verb in Dutch (zich ontwikkelen) that illustrate the same behavior :

(62a) N Het land heeft zich ontwikkeld. (62b) D Landet har udvikler sig. ~ The country has developed. (62c) D Noget har ændret sig. ~ Something has changed. (62d) D Atomet har splittet sig. ~ The atom has split.

6. Active Present perfect and its equivalents with be as auxiliary in German (Perfekt), French (Le Passé Composé), Dutch (Voltooid Tegenwoordige Tijd) and Danish (Førnutid).

This is a major construction with many occurrences in the data used to express present perfect in its capability to express the completion of an action with a new state implied in anticausative intransitives clauses. It is important to remember that table 41 on the next page only showcases the frequently used constructions, so it is possible that some of the blank cells could be filled if more translation equivalents, synonyms and lower frequencies of use were added.

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Tabel 41 – ‘Active Present Perfect’ with ‘be’-VPs in anticausative intransitive clauses in German, French, Dutch and Danish

Meaning VPs in German VPs in French VPs in Dutch VPs in Danish ‘open’ is geopend, er åbnet has opened is opengegaan ‘close’ ist geschlossen est fermé is gesloten er lukket has closed ‘begin’ is begonnen er begyndt, has begun is gestart er startet ‘end’ ist beendet est terminé is afgelopen er afsluttet has ended est fini is beëindigd ‘start’ is gestart er startet, has started is begonnen er begyndt ‘stop’ est arrêté is gestopt er stoppet has stopped ‘continue’ is doorgegaan er fortsat has continued is voortgezet ‘finish’ ist beendet est terminé is afgelopen er afsluttet has finished is beëindigd ‘turn’ ist gewendet is (om)gedraaid er vendt, has turned is gekeerd er drejet ‘change’ ist verändert is veranderd er ændret has changed er vorandret ‘develop’ er udviklet has developed ‘increase’ ist zugenommen is toegenomen er øget, has increased ist gestiegen is gestegen er steget ‘decrease’ ist gesunken is afgenomen er formindsket, has decreased is gedaald er faldet is verlaagd ‘improve’ is verbeterd er forbedret has improved ‘break’ ist zerbrochen est cassé, is kapot gegaan er brudt has broken est brisé is gebroken ‘rip’ ist gerissen is gescheurd er revet has ripped ist zerrissen ‘split’ ist gespalten est divisé is gesplitst er splittet has split is gespleten er (op)delt is verdeeld ‘crack’ ist geknackt is gebarsten er revnet has cracked ist zerbrochen is gebroken ‘tear’ ist gerissen est déchiré is gescheurd er revet has torn ist zerrissen ‘burn’ ist verbrannt is verbrand er brændt has burned ist verbrannt ‘run’ ist gelaufen ist afgelopen er kørt has run ‘move’ is verplaatst er flyttet has moved ‘download’ is gedownload er downloadet has downloaded

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Although this active reading focuses on the completion of an action, one could argue, that these clauses could be read as agentless passives. In a context with a by-clause, these VPs could be used to express a passive simple present also.

Another way to read these VPs, is to consider them as predicative ‘be + past participle: f (adj)’ as I discussed before. This would also be a non-passive reading. Again, this is not possible with all of them since not all can behave like ‘true’ adjectives, namely as an attribute to a noun, as a simple test makes clear:

I considered the Dutch ‘past participles’ and decided as a native speaker, whether they are OK when used attributively, or awkward (?) or unacceptable (*) . Just as the verb-medium collocates have semantic limitations (see next chapter), this is also true for adjective-verb collocation, which means each combination must be both grammatically and semantically acceptable. These are probably the best possible results with ‘handpicked’ mediums:

(63a) Het geopende, *opengegane, gesloten, *kapotgegane, gebroken, gebarsten raam. the opened opened closed broken broken cracked window. (63b) Het begonnen, gestarte werk. the started started work (63c) Het ?afgelopen, beëindigde feest. the finished finished party (63d) De gestopte, ?omgedraaide, ?gekeerde, verbrande, verplaatste auto. the stopped flipped turned burnt displaced car (63e) Het *doorgegane, voortgezette proces. the continued continued proces (63f) De veranderde, verbeterde omstandigheden. the changed improved circumstances (63g) De toegenomen onrust. the increased unrest (63h) De gestegen verkoop. the increased sales (63i) De afgenomen, gedaalde, verlaagde omzet. the decreased decreased decreased (63j) De gescheurde jas. the torn coat (63k) De gesplitste atoom. the split atom (63l) De gespleten tong. the split tongue (63m) De verdeelde arbeid. the divided labour (63n) Het gedownloade bestand. the downloaded file

For the verbs in this list, that do not have a ‘present perfect’ with ‘have’ as auxiliary it is easy to claim these are ‘active present perfects’. For the other verbs that are used with ‘have’ in the ‘present perfect’ in transitive clauses, one could claim that they switch auxiliaries according to the subject being a patient or an agent in the intransitive clause.

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Eventually, whether one accepts these as active anticausative intransitives able to function in a lexical ergative alternation depends on how lexical ergativity is defined and on the acceptance of lexico-grammatical readings of syncretisms.

7. ‘Reflexive Present perfect’ in French (Le Passé Composé) This VP corresponds with Le Présent (E Simple present) with se clitic insertion in French involving a shift of aspect. This occurs only in French.

Table 42 – VPs in intransitive clauses in French with être (E be) as auxiliary and with and without se insertion

Meaning VPs in French VPs in French ~ E: ‘has’ PP ~ E: ‘is’ PP ‘open’ s’est ouvert s’est ouvert ‘close’ s’est fermé ‘shut’ s’est fermé ‘end’ s’est terminé ‘stop’ s’est arrêté s’est arrêté ‘continue’ s’est poursuivi s’est poursuivi ‘finish’ s’est achevé ‘develop’ s’est développé ‘improve’ s’est amélioré ‘break’ s’est cassé s’est casé s’est brisé ‘rip’ s’est déchiré ‘split’ s’est séparé s’est fendu ‘crack’ s’est fissuré ‘tear’ s’est déchiré s’est déchiré ‘run’ s’est exécuté ‘move’ s’est déplacé ‘download’ s’est téléchargé

8. Passive simple present and its equivalents with be as auxiliary in German (Präsens), French (Le Présent), Dutch (Onvoltooid Tegenwoordige Tijd) and Danish (Nutid).

As commonly known, it is possible in English to build a passive simple present by promoting the object of a transitive clause to become subject of the passive intransitive clause, adding be as auxiliary in the simple present in combination with the past participle of the verb in the transitive clause. If no agent is added the clause is agentless. Depending on the reading and the context, one can either decide the agent is implied, and this must be interpreted as a passive, or one can read this as ‘be + past participle : f(adj)’ expressing the resultative state of an event or action, in other words a new state or situation, situated after the completion of the action referred to by the past participle as this is still a derivation of a verb.

Whatever the reading, this construction is very common across languages and if one accepts the adjectival reading then this is a construction that easily alternates with a transitive counterpart. Table 43 on the next page showcases all occurrences in the data.

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Table 43 – Cross-linguistic ‘be + past participle’: f(adj) aka passive simple present syncretism

Meaning VPs in English VPs in German VPs in VPs in Dutch VPs in Danish French ‘open’ is opened ist geöffnet est ouvert is geopend er åbnet ‘close’ is closed ist geschlossen est fermé is gesloten er lukket is shut ‘shut’ is shut ist verschlossen est fermé is afgesloten er lukket ist geschlossen is gesloten ‘begin’ is begun is begonnen er begyndt ‘end’ is ended ist beendet est terminé is beëindigd er afsluttet est fini is afgelopen ‘start’ is started is begonnen er startet er begyndt ‘stop’ is stopped ist beendet est arrêté is gestopt er stoppet ‘continue’ is continued is voortgezet er fortsat ‘finish’ is finished ist beended est fini is beëindigd er afsluttet is done ist erledigt est terminé er gjort ist getan est fait ist abgeschlossen ‘turn’ is turned ist gedreht est tourné is gedraaid er vendet ist gewendet is gekeerd ‘change’ is changed ist verändert est changé is veranderd er ændret er vorandret ‘develop’ is developed ist entwickelt est is ontwikkeld er udviklet développé ‘increase’ is increased est is er øget augmenté toegenomen er steget is verhoogd ‘decrease’ is decreased ist vermindert est diminué is verminderd er formindsket is diminished est réduit is afgenomen er faldet is reduced is verlaagd er reduceret ‘improve’ is improved ist verbessert est amélioré is verbeterd er forbedret ‘break’ is broken ist zerbrochen est cassé is gebroken er ødelagt ist gebrochen est brisé er brudt ‘rip’ is ripped ist zerrissen est déchiré is gescheurd er rippet ‘split’ is split ist gesplalten est fendu is gesplitst, er splittet is divided ist geteilt est divisé is gespleten er (op)delt is verdeeld ‘crack’ is cracked ist geknackt est fissure is gebarsten er revnet is broken ist zerbrochen est cassé is gebroken er brudt ist gesprungen ‘tear’ is torn ist gerissen est déchiré is gescheurd er revet ist zerrissen ‘burn’ is burned ist verbrannt est brûlé is verbrand er brændt ‘play’ is played est joué, est lu ‘run’ is run est exécuté er kørt is executed ‘move’ is moved est déplacé is verplaatst er flyttet ‘download’ is ist est is gedownload er downloaded heruntergeladen téléchargé downloadet

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9. ‘Be’+adjective/adverb and its equivalents in the other languages

If one accepts the adjectival reading of the past participle in the previous paragraphs, one should also consider constructions with adjectives and adverbs expressing a state. The ones that occur in the data are often very frequently used, expressing the message in an idiomatic, striking, clear and concise manner.

Table 44 – ‘Be’ + adjective/adverb occurrences in intransitive clauses

Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘open’ is open is offen est ouvert is open er åbent ‘end’ is over ist vorbei est fini is voorbij er forbi er ‘finish’ is over ist vorbei est fini is klaar er klar is af er færdig is voorbij er forbi er ‘break’ ist kaputt is kapot

10. Other variants, including present continuous in English and its equivalent constructions in the other languages and simple past in English and its equivalents in the other languages, behave in the same way as discussed in the previous section since there are no distinguishing grammatical, functional or semantic properties between transitive and intransitive clauses that need to be considered in this context.

Not all observations have been processed. Translating back and forth possibly leads to shifts in meaning and structure, comparable to people passing on a message, ending up with a completely different story. Therefore I excluded every record in which clear passive constructions including a by-clause showed up as a translation alternative for anticausative clauses, since these are both beyond the scope of this research and beyond even the broadest definition of lexical ergativity. I marked the occurrences of German werden, Dutch worden and Danish blev, which all are used mainly as auxiliaries to build passive constructions in these languages. Still, some uses, where these auxiliaries were used instead of be producing alternatives for the ‘be + past participle: f(adj’ reading, shift meaning from expressing ‘resulting state’ to ‘state in progress’. It is clear that these intransitives also have a patientlike subject and no agent mentioned. This leaves the discussion open, if the unmentioned agent must be seen as being implied or not in this case, with or without further context.

Table 45 provides an overview of all VP occurrences observed in the intransitive clauses.

ASP Active Simple Present APP Active Present Perfect (‘have’) RSP Reflexive Simple Present EPP Reflexive Present Perfect (‘have’) SPS Simple Present with s-suffix BPP Active Present Perfect (‘be’) RBP Reflexive Present Perfect (be) EGFND English, German, French, Dutch, PSP Simple Present Passive ór ‘Be’ + Past Participle : f(Adj) PAP Passive Auxiliary + Past Participle BAD ‘Be’ + Adjective/Adverb

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Table 45 – Overview of all VP occurrences observed in intransitive clauses

‘Simple present’ ‘Present Perfect’ alternatives alternatives Meaning ASP RSP SPS APP RPP BPP RBP PSP PAP BAD ‘open’ EGN GFND D E G ND F EGFND GN EGFND ‘close’ EGND GF D EF G GFND F EGFND G ‘shut’ END GF E F EGFND G ‘begin’ EGFND EGF ND END G ‘end’ EGFND F EF GFND F EGFND EGFND ‘start’ EGFND D E ND END G ‘stop’ EGND F EG FND F EGFND G ‘continue’ EGFND F D EF G ND F END GN ‘finish’ EGFND F D EF GFND F EGFND EGFND ‘turn’ EFND G D EGF G GND EGFND ‘change’ EFN GD D EF GD GND EGFND G ‘develop’ E GFND D E GND D EGFND G ‘increase’ EGFND D EGF G GND F EFND GN ‘decrease’ EGFND D EGF G GND EGFND GN ‘improve’ EN GFD D E G ND F EGFND GND ‘break’ EGND F E GFND F EGFND GD ‘rip’ EGFND F D E GND F EGFND ‘split’ END GFND D E GD GFND F EGFND ‘crack’ EGFND F EGF GND F EGFND ‘tear’ EGND F E GFND F EGFND ‘burn’ EGFND D EGF GND EGFND GND ‘play’ EGFND F D EGFND EF GN ‘run’ EGFND F E GND F EFD GN ‘move’ EFN FG D EFN G ND F EFND GN ‘download’ EGND F D E ND F EGFND GND Count E25 E0 E0 E25 E0 E0 E0 E25 E0 E3 G18 G9 G0 G8 G11 G14 G0 G18 G17 G4 F14 F18 F0 F13 F0 F6 F17 F22 F0 F3 N24 N3 N0 N2 N1 N22 N0 N23 N10 N3 D20 D4 D17 D1 D3 D23 D0 D24 D3 D4

The count of the different VPs in this selection provides us with the following information :

1. Most anticausative meanings are frequently expressed as ‘active simple presents’ without extra means. English (25) and Dutch (24) can do this by default and Danish (20) and German (18) in a clear majority of the cases while French (14 i.e. 56 % of the meanings) expresses anticausativity more often with ‘simple presents’ with se insertion (18 i.e. 72%). 2. Insertion of a reflexive clitic with ‘simple present’ is observed in all languages except English. It occurs most often in French (18), where it is a primary feature in this context while German (9 i.e. 36%) uses its sich clitic as a secondary feature. In Danish it is observed with 4 meanings and in Dutch only 3 meanings use this feature. 3. In Danish (17), just like in the other North Germanic languages, one can use ‘simple present’ in most cases in an anticausative way by either adding an -s suffix or by using the ‘regular simple present’ (20) , as has been discussed earlier. It is important to notice that these two options are alternatives and as such not complementary. Functionally they are equal, but as the s-suffix has a reflexive and passive origin, this obviously also suits the use with patient- like subjects in anticausative clauses.

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The verbal means used in perfective anticausative clauses are very different. To the best of my knowledge, they have not been compared nor discussed in detail in a comparative cross-linguistic West-European perspective as part of a causative-anticausative linguistic study.

4. Anticausative use of present perfect with have (or equivalents) as auxiliary in anticausative clauses is only widespread in English (25). In French (13) about half of the meanings are expressed as completed actions using ‘have + past participle’. In German (8) this is observed less and in Dutch (2) and Danish (1) it is uncommon. German (11) more often uses a ‘have’ + ‘past participle’ + reflexive sich clitic to express completed action in this context. A few of such occurrences are also observed in Danish (3) and Dutch (1)

5. Use of ‘be’ + past participle is the major strategy to express completed actions in an anticausative manner in Danish (23) and Dutch (22). Either verbs build their ‘present perfect’ with ‘be’-equivalent instead of ‘have’-auxiliary, or both auxiliaries can be used with the ‘be’- auxiliary being more suitable with patient-like subjects. German (14 i.e. 56%) can do this too. Only French has two alternatives with ‘be’ + ‘past participle’, one major one with verbs with reflexive clitic (17) , and one without, the latter used less often (6). I noticed that some verbs could either be used with or without se clitic. Whether translation bias, lack of proficiency of users or specific grammar are involved has not been investigated.

Abraham (2003), referring to a VP syncretism, points out that sein + Participium (E ‘be’ + ‘past participle’ ) in German could be read, not only as a simple present passive expressing a resultative event, but also as predicative ‘be’ + past participle functioning as an adjective, being voice neutral and expressing a resultative state, therefore qualifying as a valid anticausative counterpart to a causative present perfect clause. In this context ‘present perfect’ using ‘be’, ‘simple present passive’ and ‘be’ + ‘past participle’ : f(adj) can all be observed, resulting in this question : when can these VPs be considered as functioning in (active) anticausative clauses and when are they beyond the scope of lexical ergativity?

The scope of lexical ergativity is dependent on its definition. If lexical ergativity is mainly linked to semantics, then all VPs with patient-like mediums, with subject-instigators in the causative role, and without agents involved (mentioned or implied) in the anticausative counter clause, are valid alternatives, independent of the morpho-syntax, voice or aspect involved, especially if applied to the collocation of potential verbs and suitable mediums that have an ergative record as is the case with this selection being linked to meanings derived from frequently used labile verbs in English. Consequently, if all VP-alternatives are cross-linguistically semantically equivalent within the clauses, then they should all be considered valid implementations. User frequency and the pragmatics of the comparative data rendered license this functional view.

The active transitive sentences of this selection can all be converted to passive intransitives. English (25), Danish (24), Dutch (23) and French (22) prefer simple present passives using ‘be’ as an auxiliary of passive voice, especially when expressing both resulting or eventive state. German (18) uses this only when expressing a resulting state. If an eventive state is expressed, German (17) prefers the use of another passive auxiliary, namely werden48, which is a translation equivalent of the auxiliary be as used in the formation of passives in

48 Werden in German has other functions and meanings different from this use 87

English. This feature is also observed to a lesser extent in Dutch (10), using a worden equivalent, and Danish (3) with blev as equivalent auxiliary.

These uses could be considered as agentless passives. Still the clauses mean pretty much the same as those with present perfects with ‘be’ and those with ‘be’ + past participle : f(adj). Although this study focuses on the ergative alternations as a means to explore ergativity cross- linguistically, in the process other alternatives emerge. Users can either use [NP VP NP] for causative events, active voice anticausative [NP VP] phrases or other alternative phrasing or syntax available to them. Pragmatically and thus depending on the context and the intended effect, passive voice intransitives are an alternative for both active voice transitives and active voice intransitives.

Although there are many subtle and definable differences between all occurrences observed, people use patterns at will, led by concepts and structures related to their language. This is mixed in with intuition, habits, readily available phrasing and a good deal of coincidence. This is fed into corpora and translation systems and after being refined by frequency related algorithms it has been made available for linguistic study and other applications.

3. Structural Variation in Alternations

On the basis of the data obtained in the previous section, I compared all transitive (table 39) and intransitive VPs (table 45) per language and made an analysis of features. This comparative table is available in Appendix 2, pages 38-40. Table 46 on the next page summarizes the cross-linguistic counts. These are the results related to potential ergative alternation. The scores included refer to the number of meanings out of 25 that display a certain property.

1. Although MT rendered more alternative tenses in English (including simple past and present continuous, even after back translation from all other languages in all meanings considered VPs can alternate using labile verbs, using both simple present (25) or present perfect (25) in both clauses. When present perfect is used in the anticausative clause it expresses the completion of the action or the event. Passive simple present is an alternative if a resulting state needs to be expressed and can also be read as be + past participle : f(adj). Alternative constructions emerge but are complementary to the clauses in the labile alternation. These data confirm the special status of English in relation to lexical ergativity. If only lability is retained as prototypical ergative behavior, then English is a prototypical example of an accusative language manifesting this property.

2. In German lability occurs as main strategy in ‘simple present’ (18) alternations. Anticausative alternation (7) with reflexive sich clitic in the anticausative clause is a possible secondary strategy with the other meanings. When alternating with perfective clauses only 10 meanings retain lability. 10 more can implement an anticausative alternation with a ‘present perfect’ with haben (E have) and sich clitic. Four (4) meanings prefer to use ‘be + past participle’ expressing a resultative state and four (4) more do not render any of the previous options but use werden + ‘past participle, thus implementing an agentless passive expressing an eventive state. Both prototypical labile and anticausative alternations in all tenses are licensed by the German data with 6 verb meanings each.

3. In French lability occurs as main strategy with ‘simple present’ (18) alternations. Anticausative alternation (9) with reflexive se clitic in the anticausative clause is a secondary strategy with the other meanings. When alternating with perfective clauses using ‘present

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perfect’ with se clitic and ‘be’-auxiliary, this becomes the main strategy. Consequently in perfective alternations the anticausative alternation (16) is often preferred and only 7 labile uses are retained. VP and patient-like mediums correspond well in both strategies. In the end 7 uses can be implemented with a labile strategy in all tenses and 8 preserve the anticausative alternation described both with simple and perfective aspect.

4. Dutch and Danish are both double-faced. In clauses with ‘simple present’ lability stands strong with 24 meanings covered in Dutch and 20 meanings in Danish. Danish shows a secondary strategy here with either s-suffix or sig clitic in the anticausative alternation (5). Dutch has a number of suppletive phrasal alternatives, but they are mostly complementary to labile alternatives. When perfectivity is expressed, both languages prefer to switch to ‘be’ + past participle : f(adj) as default strategy expressing resulting state. In both languages only one meaning retains lability, and only two prefer an anticausative alternation in both tenses.

Table 46 – Cross-linguistic counts of potential ergative strategies

Language Simple Present Simple present present perfect + present perfect alternations alternations alternations English LAB 25 LAB 25 pLAB 25 AC 0 AC 0 pAC 0 AD 0 SHT 0 PAS 0 German LAB 18 LAB 7 pLAB 6 AC 7 AC 10 pAC 6 AD 4 SHT 13 PAS 4 French LAB 16 LAB 7 pLAB 7 AC 9 AC 16 pAC 8 AD 0 SHT 10 PAS 1 Dutch LAB 24 LAB 1 pLAB 1 AC 1 AC 1 pAC 1 AD 22 SHT 23 PAS 1 Danish LAB 20 LAB 1 pLAB 1 AC 5 AC 2 pAC 2 AD 21 SHT 22 PAS 1

LAB Labile alternation possible AC Anticausative alternation possible if LAB not possible AD be + past participle : f(adj) alternation possible if LAB and AC not possible PAS Agentless passive alternation possible if LAB, AC and AD not possible pLAB Licensed by data as prototypical labile alternation pAC Licensed by data as prototypical anticausative alternation SHT Ergative strategy switch between simple present and present perfect alternations

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The outcome of this section on structural variation and alternation can be summarized as follows.

Despite the many alternatives rendered, English can implement lability both with a simple and perfective aspect. The other languages all support lability with simple present as a main strategy. Additionally German and French anticausative alternations are confirmed with simple present. Danish has a supplementary anticausative strategy in ‘present tense’ using s-suffix as an alternative for either lability or an anticausative sig clitic With VPs expressing perfective aspect, in German and French the anticausative alternations become the major strategy while lability falls back to a secondary level. In Dutch and Danish a complete strategy shift is introduced using ‘be’ + past participle : f(adj) as a replacement for lability when describing the resultative state of an event.

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3.2.4. Cross-linguistic semantic comparison In this section we gather semantic data per verb meaning and per semantic cluster to make our final observations and reach functional conclusions in respect to the use of the verb meanings and mediums under investigation in ergative alternations. For each translation equivalent, I selected up to eight mediums that occurred frequently as collocates, both in subject and in object position. To obtain these data, I used the collocates option in Sketch Engine and applied it in the five TenTen web-corpora, corresponding with the five languages of this study as used before in this research. With some verbs, it proved to be difficult to detect eight suitable collocates. In such a case I selected as many as possible and inserted blanks (-) for unavailable collocates.

Each collocate was numbered according to the following rules : I incremented per entry from top to bottom, from left to right, unless the entry was a translation equivalent. In that case the entry got the same number as its previous translation equivalent.

To produce a general score on the basis of the diversity of the translation equivalents, for each meaning I took the highest number of the entries and added the number of blank positions if collocates were not available. The score is the first number in the bottom left table cell. I ranked according to the scores obtained. The ranking is the second number in the bottom left table cell. Although these scores and rankings are only indicative, they help us understand, which meanings use more of the same mediums cross-linguistically (in case of a low score) and which do not. Accordingly a low score can indicate the use is semantically restricted and common, a higher score can be an indication of different applicable senses across languages. In my view, meanings with a low score prove to be more prototypical cross-linguistically, especially when it is easy to select a series of mediums with translation equivalents that function across languages.

Additionally, I calculated a second score, on the basis of the availability of at least three frequently used translation equivalents across languages. If three equivalents are available in all five languages, the ‘equi’ score is 3. For each missing entry, the score goes down : 3-, 3--, 2.5, 2++, 2+,2,2- etc. A high ‘equi’ score confirms the use of meanings in exactly the same context across languages. The lower the score, the less this applies and the less prototypical I consider this use.

1. {‘open’,’close’,’shut’} cluster

In Levin (1993) open, close and shut are classified as “alternating verbs of change of state” (ibid.: 244- 245) with as main property “the ability to participate in the causative/inchoative alternation. (ibid.: 246).

1.1. ‘open’

Table 47 – Frequently used mediums with ‘open’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘open’ open (sich) öffnen (s’)ouvrir opendoen/opengaan åbne 1 door 1 Tür 1 porte 1 deur 1 dør 2 eyes 3 Fenster 2 oeil 2 oog 2 øje 3 window 6 Tor/Pforte 12 ciel 6 poort 3 vindue 4 store 2 Auge(n) 3 fenêtre 13 luik 14 mulighed49 equi: 3 5 mouth 5 Mund 5 bouche 3 raam, venster 4 butik 6 gate 9 Herz 7 école 4 winkel 6 port score/rank 7school 10 Datei 4 magasin 15 - 10 fil 16/1 8 restaurant 11 Blick 8 restaurant 16 - 5 mund

49 Possibility 91

‘Open’ is used in a prototypical lexical ergative context, with recurring mediums with a high user frequency in all five languages. ‘Open’ is primarily associated with entrances like door (1), window (3) and gate (7), and with body parts that can be opened, e.g. eyes (2), mouth (5). These uses are very concrete, referring to a physical change of state of the element involved. A second frequent application of ‘open’ is the referral to the functional opening of store (4), school (7) , restaurant (8) and (probably with a lower frequency) all other kinds of entities. ‘Open’ here means ‘open for business, functioning, working’. Some other uses of ‘open’ appear e.g. in German Herz (9, English heart) which is a metaphorical use, German Datei and Danish fil (10, English file) as a new digital application and French ciel (12, English heaven) representing a figurative image. Abstract mediums are possible but clearly not the most frequently occurring.

1.2. ‘close’

Table 48 – Frequently used mediums with ‘close’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘close’ close (sich) schließen (se) fermer sluiten lukke 1 eyes 2 Tür 1 oeil 2 deur 1 dør 2 door 1 Auge(n) 2 porte 1 oog 2 øje 3 window 3 Fenster 3 fenêtre 4 winkel 3 vindue 4 store 9 Lücke 4 boutique 16 dag 5 skole equi: 3- 5 school 10 Studium 13 usine 17 week 12 port 6 mouth 11 Freundschaft 14 site 18 keuken 7 låg score/rank 7 lid 12 Tor 15 parc 19 bedrijf 6 mund 20/5 8 case 4 Laden 8 boîte 12 poort 20 grænse50

‘Close’ is the lexical counterpart of ‘open’. These two meanings function like flipflops in a binary circuit, allowing two opposite states, either open or closed. ‘Close’ is first associated with the same primary collocate mediums of ‘open’, namely door (2), window (3), gate (12, German Tor, Dutch poort, Danish port) as entrances, and store (4) and school (5) as entities. Lid (7), case (8), shutter (9, German Lücke) are closed in a similar physical change of state sense while factory (13, French usine), site (14, French site), park (15, French parc), kitchen (19, Dutch keuken), firm (20, Dutch bedrijf) and border (21, Danish grænse) are closed in a functional change of state manner. German Freundschaft (11, English friendship) involves ‘close’ in a metaphorical use.

1.3. ‘shut’

Table 49 – Frequently used mediums with ‘shut’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘shut’ shut (sich) schließen (se) fermer sluiten lukke 1 door 1 Tür 2 oeil 1 deur 1 dør 2 eyes 2 Auge(n) 1 porte 2 oog 2 øje 3 factory 9 Lücke 5 fenêtre 3 bedrijf 3 vindue 4 shop 10 Tor 3 usine 10 poort 19 skole equi: 3- 5 window 5 Fenster 13 bouche 4 winkel 10 port 6 lid 11 Studium 4 boutique 16 dag 6 låg score/rank 7 mine 4 Laden 14 site 17 week 13 mund 20/6 8 computer 12 Freundschaft 15 parc 18 keuken 20 grænse

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‘Shut’ is a synonym of ‘close’. This becomes clear in translation as both relate to the same translation equivalents in the other languages. On the other hand, despite being synonyms, there is a difference in frequency of the mediums associated to them e.g. factory (3) and mine (7) prefer to be shut, store (‘close’ 4) and school (‘close’ 5) are more often closed. This clearly supports the view, that semantic properties and lexical use differentiates even on the level of the individual words, thus making semantic generalizations hard to formulate. In the case of ‘shut’, entities can be closed permanently (this asks for the use of ‘shut’) or temporarily (this associates more with ‘close’). This reasoning cannot be applied in general though as general understanding of doors and eyes include the option of reopening unless you add ‘forever’. This leads me to conclude that verbs get their meaning from at least four levels of understanding : 1. The ‘general’ meaning, an average conception of the main uses corresponding with knowledge of this basic concept. 2. The meaning associated with its collocates assuming basic understanding of specific use. 3. The meaning as refined by the further grammatical context , assuming advanced understanding of the language. 4. The meaning resulting from understanding the general social-cultural context e.g. there are laws and circumstances in which a firm has to shut and cannot be reopened. This last context is often assumed but can easily lead to unprecise understanding if the receiver either presupposes another context or is ignorant of this social-cultural context. There is a fair chance of course, that this accords with limited knowledge of language and culture, though this is not a prerequisite.

2. {‘begin’,’start’,’stop’,’end’,’finish’,’continue’} cluster

All verbs in this cluster, listed as aspectual verbs in Levin (1993: 274-275), describe “the initiation, termination, or continuation of an activity” (ibid. : 274) and are subcategorized as verbs that all have intransitive uses, and may or may not allow transitive causative uses. She does not develop this further, but my research indicates that some themes of mediums do allow ergative alternations as is exemplified in the following paragraphs.

2.1. begin

Table 49 – Frequently used mediums with ‘begin’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘begin’ begin beginnen commencer beginnen begynde 1 work 1 Arbeit 8 journée 8 dag 8 dag 2 process 5 Reise 1 travail 13 wedstrijd 5 rejse 3 construction 4 Jahr 3 construction 6 week 11 sæson 4 year 7 Leben 4 année 14 avond 13 kamp equi: 3- 5 journey 9 Spiel 12 aventure 5 reis 10 karriere 6 week 10 Karriere 6 semaine 7 leven 16 tur score/rank 7 life 11 Saison 7 vie 11 seizoen 15 historie 16/2 8 day 8 Tag 5 voyage 15 verhaal 16 krig

“Begin” is prototypically used in a lexical ergative context with recurring frequently used mediums in all five languages. The mediums primarily express periods of time e.g. day (8), week (6), year (4, German Jahr, French année), life (7) and season (11, German Saison, Dutch seizoen, Danish saeson), including also mainly human operations or undertakings. These include work (1), process (2), construction (3), game (9, German spiel), career (10, German Karriere) and others. In all cases, the meaning in both the causative and anticausitive clauses focuses on the beginning of the period of the operation.

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2.2. start

Table 51 – Frequently used mediums with ‘start’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘start’ start starten démarrer starten starte 1 year 7 Saison 13 carrière 6 bedrijf 7 sæson 2 process 9 Aktion 4 journée 3 project 4 day 3 project 3 Projekt 14 ordinateur 19 onderneming 3 project 4 day 4 Tag 15 moteur 10 programma 15 motor equi : 3-- 5 work 8 Spiel 16 windows 20 wedstrijd 10 program 6 company 10 Programm 7 season 21 cursus 20 kamp score/rank 7 season 11 Kampagne 17 aventure 4 dag 18 bil 22/7 8 game 12 Tour 18 voiture 22 training 12 tur

‘Start’ involves a meaning close to ‘begin’, with some overlay when the two meanings can be considered equivalent and synonymous, this primarily with periods of time e.g. year (1), day (4) and season (7) and also including operations or undertakings e.g. process (3), work (5), game (8), action (9, German Aktion), program (10, German Programm, Dutch programma, Danish program), campaign (11, German Kampagne), contest (20, Dutch wedstrijd, Danish kamp) and most other entries in this table. If mediums refer to machines and devices, start is preferred e.g. engine (15, French moteur, Danish motor), computer (14, French ordinateur) and car (18, Danish bil)

2.3. stop

Table 52 – Frequently used mediums with ‘stop’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘stop’ stop stoppen (s’)arrêter) stoppen stoppe 1 car 5 Blutung 1 voiture 2 trein 5 blødning 2 train 9 Haarausfall 12 guerre 6 bus 19 produktion 3 traffic 1 Wagen 14 moteur 1 auto 12 krig 4 clock 10 Gewalt 15 processus 17 energie 6 bus equi : 3- 5 bleeding 11 Wachstum 13 machine 5 bloeding 1 bil 6 bus 2 Zug 8 combat 18 tijd 20 leg51 score/rank 7 people 12 Krieg 2 train 13 machine 8 kamp 20/8 8 fighting 13 Maschine 16 mouvement 4 klok 2 tog

‘Stop’ refers to the complementary operation of ‘start’. Frequently used mediums either refer to vehicles e.g. car (1), train (2) and bus (6) and devices e.g. clock (4), machine (13 German Maschine, French machine), engine (14, French moteur) or a varied collection of processes and events that preferably be stopped e.g. traffic (3), bleeding (5), fighting (8), hairloss (9 German Haarausfall), violence (11, German Gewalt) etc.

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2.4. end

Table 53 – Frequently used mediums with ‘end’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘end’ end (be)enden (se)terminer eindigen ende 1 war 1 Krieg 2 saison 20 duel 12 kamp 2 season 2 Saison 3 journée 21 reis 2 sæson 3 day 9 Spiel 6 année 22 tocht 11 tur 4 week 10 Abend 15 étape 12 wedstrijd 1 krieg equi : 2+ 5 career 11 Tour 16 mandat 23 wandeling 21 rejse 6 year 12 Kampf 17 séance 11 tour 24 historie score/rank 7 month 13 Serie 18 livre 3 dag 25 diskussion 25/16 8 marriage 14 Prozeß 19 course 2 seizoen 3 dag

‘End’ refers to the complementary operation of ‘begin’ and shares mediums with ‘start’ and ‘stop’. There is an overlay in use and meaning between ‘begin’ and ‘start’ on the one hand, and ‘stop’ and ‘finish’ on the other hand. ‘End’ primarily associates with periods e.g. season (2), day (3), week (4), year (6), month (7) and evening (10 German Abend), including a variety of human operations that take time and must come to an end at one time or another e.g. war (1), career (5), marriage (7), game (9 German Spiel), trip (11 German Tour, Dutch tour, Danish tur) and most other entries.

2.5. finish

Table 54 – Frequently used mediums with ‘finish’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘finish’ finish (be)enden (se)terminer eindigen slutte 1 race 2 Saison 2 saison 2 seizoen 2 sæson 2 season 3 Spiel 4 jounée 12 wedstrijd 10 aften 3 game 9 Krieg 15 année 21 duel 25 fest 4 day 10 Abend 16 mandat 22 tocht 11 tur equi : 2+ 5 project 11 Tour 17 séance 23 wandeling 4 dag 6 week 12 Kampf 18 livre 11 tour 26 sang score/rank 7 run 13 Serie 19 étape 4 dag 27 karriere 28/20 8 installation 14 Prozeß 20 course 24 reis 28 periode

“Finish” has a substantial overlay with both “stop” and “end” since they have translation equivalents in common. Moreover, they share mediums, independent of the verbs used. In contrast, combining alternative verbs with alternative mediums may be restricted and may seem either awkward or unacceptable to native speakers. This leads to the conclusion that there must be not only a semantic, but also a syntactic binding between medium and verb, possibly on the basis of other properties pertaining to the relationship including frequency of use. The general idea is, that if medium-verb combinations are often used, they are easily and without much thought accepted, while uncommon combinations need more thought and interpretation.

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2.6. continue

Table 55 – Frequently used mediums with ‘continue’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘continue’ continue fortsetzen continuer doorgaan/voortzetten fortsætte 1 work 2 Trend 14 combat 7 reis 25 tur 2 trend 6 Wachstum 15 lutte 1 werk 15 kamp 3 effort 9 Lese 16 aventure 21 traditie 6 vækst 4 program 10 Höhenflug 17 guerre 22 samenwerking 7 rejse equi: 1++ 5 process 11 Serie 11 série 23 carriére 26 succes 6 growth 12 Koalition 18 vie 24 onderneming 27 fest score/rank 7 journey 13 Politik 19 mouvement 25 tocht 17 krig 28/21 8 discussion 7 Reise 20 histoire 2 trend 28 behandling

‘Continue’ has operational mediums in common with ‘begin,start’ and ‘end,finish’ e.g. work (1), program (4), process (5), journey (7, Deutsch Reise, Dutch reis, Danish rejse), life (18, French vie), trip (25, Dutch tocht, Danish tur), contest,match (14, French combat, Danish kamp) and war (18, French guerre, Danish krig) and others. It focuses on the progress of the operation or event. The diversity of the mediums cross-linguistically is striking. There are no prototypical mediums except journey (7) and growth (6), but a lot of available operations in each language that one can continue or that can be continued.

3. {‘change’,’turn’,’develop’,’increase’,’improve’,’decrease’} cluster

Decrease, increase and improve are classified as “other” verbs of change of state in Levin (1993: 245- 247) merely on the basis of the property they share with change of state verbs in general, namely the ability to participate in the causative/inchoative alternation (ibid.: 246).

3.1. change

Table 56 – Frequently used mediums with ‘change’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘change’ change verändern changer veranderen ændre 1 life 1 Leben 2 monde 8 omstandigheid 6 regel 2 world 2 Welt 1 vie 2 wereld 2 verd 3 climate 3 Klima 5 nom 14 wet 3 klima 4 landscape 4 Landschaft 12 couleur 7 ding 7 ting equi:2++ 5 name 9 Aussehen 11 comportement 11 gedrag 18 afgørelse52 6 rule 10 Struktur 13 mentalité 15 maatschappij 16 lovgivning53 score/rank 7 thing 11 Verhalten 6 règle 16 regelgeving53 14 lov 18/3 8 situation 8 Situation 9 regard 17 samenleving 10 struktur

Some universal themes are prototypical mediums bound to ‘change’ e.g. life (1), world (2), landscape (4) and since recently climate (3). General human themes fit this category too e.g. (every)thing (7), rule (6), situation (8), structure (10, German Struktur), behavior (11 German Verhalten, French comportement, mentalité, Dutch gedrag) and society (15 Dutch maatschappij). Either the government or we will ‘change’ it all, or it will ‘change’ itself.

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3.2. turn

Table 57 – Frequently used mediums with ‘turn’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘turn’ turn (sich)wenden tourner draaien vende 1 attention 9 Blatt 2 tête 16 muziek 10 blik 2 head 10 Blick 10 regard 6 wiel 5 ansigt 3 eye 1 Aufmerksamkeit 6 roue 17 software 2 hoved 4 light 2 Kopf 9 page 18 programma 3 øje equi: 2 5 face 11 Gericht 13 engine 24 - 19 skude54 6 wheel 12 Methode 14 jeu 25 - 20 situation score/rank 7 life 3 Auge 15 usine 26 - 21 stemning 27/19 8 people 5 Gesicht 23 - 27 - 22 ting

Specific ergative use of ‘turn’ in NP V (VP) ergative alternations is not very productive but limited to change of focus e.g. attention (1), head (2), eye (3), light (4), face (5) and look (10 German Blick, French regard, Danish blik) , a second meaning involving change of direction or side e.g. wheel (6) and page (9, German Blatt, French page) and some other meanings of ‘turn’ in overlay with uses of ‘run, execute, play’ and ‘change’. ‘Turn’ + PP e.g. ‘turn into’ generates more ergative applications as is exemplified in Collins’ Cobuild Dictionary.

3.3. develop

Table 58 – Frequently used mediums with ‘develop’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘develop’ develop (sich) entwickeln (se) développer (zich) ontwikkelen udvikle (sig) 1 project 9 Idee 15 activité 10 vaardigheid 3 teknologi 2 country 1 Projekt 16 réseau 1 project 22 koncept 3 technology 10 Fähigkeit 3 technologie 19 visie 23 metode 4 program 11 Spiel 2 pays 20 techniek 24 samarbejde equi:2+ 5 business 12 Software 17 maladie 3 technologie 10 kompetence 6 system 13 Form 5 entreprise 2 land 4 program score/rank 7 course 14 Strategy 18 cancer 6 systeem 11 spil 24/15 8 industry 6 System 10 compétence 21 kennis 12 software

Ergative alternations with ‘develop’ situate mainly in the domain of business and technology and mediums refer to conceptual notions e.g. project (1), technology (3), program (4), business (5), system (6), course (7), industry (8), idea (9, German Idee), competence (10, German Fähigkeit, French competence, Dutch vaardigheid, Danish kompetence) and many others. Mediums include illness (17, French maladie) and cancer (18, French cancer) and probably anything that one can develop or that can develop itself.

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3.4. increase

Table 59 – Frequently used mediums with ‘increase’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘increase’ increase steigern augmenter verhogen øge 1 number 7 Umsatz 1 nombre 10 productiviteit 6 risiko 2 rate 10 Produktivität 16 taux 17 weerstand 10 produktivitet 3 level 11 Wohlbefinden 4 production 18 comfort 4 produktion 4 production 10 Leistungsfähigkeit 6 risque 19 veiligheid 21 kapacitet equi: 2 5 cost 12 Lebensqualität 14 vitesse 20 bloeddruk 18 komfort 6 risk 13 Spannung 16 salaire 16 belastingen 22 vækst score/rank 7 revenue 14 Tempo 5 prix 6 risico 23 effektivitet 23/14 8 use 15 Motivation 7 revenu 14 snelheid 14 hastighed

Only three mediums frequently ‘increase’ in ergative alternations cross-linguistically in all five languages, namely production (4), productivity (10, German Produktivität, Dutch productiviteit, Danish produktivitet) and risk (6). They represent themes that either involve quantitative notions e.g. number (1), rate (2), level (3), cost (5), revenue (7), use (8), speed (14, German Tempo, French vitesse, Dutch snelheid, Danish hastighed), taxes (16 French taux, Dutch belastingen), growth (22, Danish vækst), blood pressure (20, Dutch bloeddruk) or qualitative concepts e.g wellbeing (11, German Wohlbefinden), quality of life (12, German Lebensqualität), motivation (15, German Motivation), comfort (18, Dutch comfort), or negative aspects e.g. tension (13, German Spannung) and resistance (17, Dutch weerstand).

3.5. improve

Table 60 – Frequently used mediums with ‘improve’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘improve’ improve (sich) verbessern (s’)améliorer verbeteren forbedre (sig) 1 health 9 Situation 2 qualité 3 prestatie 20 arbejdsmiljø 2 quality 2 Qualität 3 performance 5 conditie 21 indeklima55 3 performance 10 Lebensqualität 5 condition 1 gezondheid 8 relation 4 skill 4 Fähigkeit 9 situation 2 kwaliteit 2 kvalitet equi: 3-- 5 condition 11 Lage 1 santé 9 situatie 10 livskvalitet 6 efficiency 3 Leistung 14 visibilité 17 proces 22 indsats56 score/rank 7 life 12 Chance 15 état 18 doorbloeding 1 sundhed 22/9 8 relation 13 Wohlbefinden 16 systéme 19 communicatie 5 vilkår

While ‘improve’ shares mediums referring to qualitative concepts with ‘increase’ it is vaguer as to the features that contribute to the improvement. In other words, it not necessarily refers to an increase, but can include any measure that makes something better, therefore many concepts can be named to ‘improve’, either in a causal, instigated or intrinsic, self-developing manner. Cross-linguistically health (1), quality (2) and performance (3) are frequently used in all five languages, but also skill (4), condition (5), situation (9, German Situation, French situation, Dutch situatie), relation (8), quality of life (10, German Lebensqualität, Danish livskvalitet) occur more than once across languages.

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3.6. decrease

Table 61 – Frequently used mediums with ‘decrease’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘decrease’ decrease reduzieren diminuer verminderen reducere 1 rate 8 Anzahl 2 consommation 15 stress 9 risiko 2 consumption 9 Risiko 13 taux 18 klacht 6 omkostning 3 level 6 Kosten 8 nombre 19 eetlust 4 udledning 4 emission 8 Zahl 14 douleur 14 pijn 8 antal equi: 2+ 5 mortality 10 Gewicht 15 pression 4 uitstoot 22 støj57 6 cost 11 Aufwand58 10 poids 15 spanning 23 CO2 score/rank 7 production 4 Emission 16 vitesse 20 weerstand 2 vorbrug 23/13 8 number 12 Komplexität 17 volume 21 zwelling 15 stress

‘Decrease’ refers to the complementary event of ‘increase’, and shares multiple mediums that can both ‘increase’ and ‘decrease’ e.g. number (8), rate (1), level (3), emission (4), production (7), cost (5), risk (9, German Risiko, Danish risiko), taxes (13, French taux) and others. A number of human personal challenges are referred to frequently also e.g. weight (11, German Gewicht, French poids), pain (14, French douleur, Dutch pijn), stress (15, French pression, Dutch stress, spanning Danish stress) and appetite (19 Dutch eetlust). Obviously ‘decrease’ of these is frequently attempted (causal) or observed (intrinsic wishful thinking).

4. {‘break’,’crack’,’rip’,’split’,’tear’,’burn’} cluster

In the verb classification of Levin (1993) break, rip, tear and split appear in a semantic cluster where their meaning can be paraphrased as “separate by V-ing, where ‘V’ is the basic meaning of the verbs considered (ibid. : 166). Break, rip, tear and split reappear together with crack in Levin (1993: 241- 242) where she refers to the description of these verbs by Hale and Keyser (1987) as verbs that “refer to actions that bring about a change in the material integrity of some entity” (ibid.: 243). Typical for these verbs is the lack of information on how the change of state came about and their ability to function both in ergative and middle alternations. Burn is classified in Levin (1993: 244) as an alternating verb of change of state able to participate in the causative/inchoative alternation and reappears as a “verb of entity-specific change of state imposing very narrow selectional restrictions on its arguments (ibid.: 246-247). This is confirmed by this research (see this section, paragraph 4.6)

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4.1. break

Table 62 – Frequently used mediums with ‘break’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘break’ break brechen (se) briser breken bryde 1 heart 9 Damm 1 coeur 1 hart 7 is 2 record 1 Herz 6 vitre 7 ijs 22 stilhed 3 news 7 Eis 7 glace 6 glas 23 forsegling59 4 story 10 Bein 15 rêve 19 nagel 24 grænser equi: 2++ 5 thing 11 Knochen 16 chaîne 20 ei 12 tabu 6 glass 12 Tabu 6 verre 8 tand 25 barriere score/rank 7 ice 13 Lanze 17 miroir 21 neus 26 aftale60 26/17 8 tooth 14 Stück 18 élan 11 bot 22 tavshed

Especially glass (6) and ice (7) ‘break’ literally, physically and cross-linguistically. Other physical changes of state include body parts e.g. tooth (8), leg (10, German Bein), bone (11, German Knochen, Dutch bot), nose (21, Dutch neus), other breakable items e.g. mirror (17, French miroir), egg (20, Dutch ei) and items of which the ‘break’-ing is either attempted e.g. chain (16,French chaîne) or feared e.g. dam (9, German Damm). Some things (5) just ‘break’ easily (which would be a property and thus a middle construction). Ergative alternations also include metaphorical use of ‘break’, with heart (1) as most frequently mentioned medium. Danish prefers knække as another translation equivalent for ‘break’ in this case. Other figurative and metaphorical ‘break’-able and ‘break’-ing mediums are record (2), news (3), story (4), taboo (12, German Tabu, Danish tabu), lance (13 German Lanze), dream (15, French rêve), silence (22, Danish stilhed, tavshed) and others.

4.2. crack

Table 63 – Frequently used mediums with ‘crack’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘crack’ crack knacken craquer kraken knække 1 knuckle 7 Nuss 15 articulation 7 noot 14 gren 2 rib 9 Jackpot 16 vernis 14 tak 22 tand 3 skull 4 Knochen 17 capote 4 bot 7 nød 4 bone 10 Marke 18 plancher 6 ijs 23 negl equi: 1++ 5 egg 11 Schloss 19 parquet 28 24 ledning 6 ice 12 Rekord 6 glace 29 25 hår score/rank 7 nut 13 Passwort 20 soir 30 26 hals 31/24 8 window 14 Ast 21 doigt 31 27 spids

‘Crack’ refers to a specific way of ‘break’-ing and shares mediums e.g. bone (4), egg (5), ice (6) and others. Specific body parts rather ‘crack’, which includes a specific sound e.g. knuckle (1), skull (3), finger (21, French doigt). In contrast, ‘break’ is more often associated with glass. Cross-linguistically nut (7) is the prototypical medium associated with this type of breaking. Because of its specific meaning, many mediums that can ‘break’ are not (frequently) associated with ‘crack’. Therefore ‘crack’ is not observed to be very productive in ergative alternations. Still, ‘crack’ has a number of specific figurative uses including mediums like jackpot (9, German Jackpot), password (13, German

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Passwort) but these expressions may be translated in other languages preferably using other translations equivalents for ‘crack’.

4.3. rip

Table 64 – Frequently used mediums with ‘rip’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘rip’ rip reißen déchirer scheuren rippe 1 DVD 8 Loch 15 voile 9 kruisband 1 DVD 2 CD 6 Kleid 14 ciel 19 nagel 2 CD 3 shirt 9 Kreuzband 13 papier 9 ligament 21 musik 4 seam 10 Kondom 16 rideau61 10 condoom 22 video equi : 1- 5 jeans 11 Arm 17 coeur62 13 papier 25 6 dress 12 Stück 9 ligament 20 broek 26 score/rank 7 flesh 13 Papier 18 tissu 23 27 28/22 8 hole 14 Himmel 7 peau 24 28

‘Rip’ means about the same as ‘tear’ (see further). ‘Rip’ and ‘tear’ share translation equivalents and mediums [1] either referring to clothes e.g. shirt (3), jeans (5), dress (6), [2] the type of damage as a consequence of ‘rip’-ping e.g. seam (4), hole (8), [3] items that ‘rip’ easily e.g. paper (13, German Papier, French papier, Dutch papier), veil (15, French voile), or [4] body parts e.g. skin, flesh (7), tendon, ligament (9 German Kreuzband, French ligament, Dutch ligament). The anticausative use often refers to the resulting state, expressed by present perfect in English and auxiliary + past participle : f(adjective) in the other languages. This use is not very productive. ‘Rip’ has developed a new ergative use though, referring to (a) the conversion of data including music (21, Danish music) and video (22, Danish video) and (b) using digital media e.g. DVD (1), CD (2) as source to execute this digital conversion. This meaning cannot be expressed by ‘tear’ and its conventional translation equivalents.

4.4. split

Table 65 – Frequently used mediums with ‘split’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘split’ split (sich)spalten (se) diviser (zich) splitsen splitte 1 atom 9 Lager 16 gauche 23 rechtspersoon 28 opposition 2 party 10 Gemüt 17 monde 20 scherm 2 parti 3 vote 11 Nation 2 parti 24 vennootschap 11 nation 4 fleet 12 Holz 18 opinion 25 venster 25 venstre equi 2-- 5 nucleus 1 Atom 19 droite 26 ei 27 land 6 team 13 Gesellschaft 20 écran 27 land 29 Europa score/rank 7 seam 14 Enzym 21 territoire 2 partij 30 gruppe 31/23 8 lip 15 Neutron 22 nombre 6 team 31 kabel

Cross-linguistically there are only a limited number of frequently used mediums in ergative configurations that ‘split’ e.g. atom (1), party(2), country (27, Dutch land, Danish land). ‘Split’ is more specific than ‘divide’. Consequently not everything that can be divided is ‘split’. French ‘(se) diviser’ functions as translation equivalent for both meanings. In each language a number of ‘split’-able

61 Curtain 62 Heart 101 mediums are observed, but the frequency of use clearly differs for each language. The domains of emerging themes include politics, state- and social entities, chemistry, biology and technology.

4.5. tear

Table 66 – Frequently used mediums with ‘tear’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘tear’ tear reißen (se) déchirer scheuren skære 1 ligament 1 Kreuzband 17 voile 1 kruisband 1 ledbånd 2 tendon 9 Loch 15 ciel 1 ligament 14 papir 3 flesh 10 Kleid 14 papier 11 condoom 11 kondom 4 shirt 11 Kondom 18 rideau 14 papier 10 tæppe63 equi: 2++ 5 meniscus 12 Arm 19 coeur 20 nagel 24 - 6 muscle 13 Stück 1 ligament 21 broek 25 - score/rank 7 fabric 14 Papier 20 tissu 22 - 26 - 27/18 8 - 15 Himmel 3 peau 23 - 27 -

Ergative use of ‘tear’ is similar to ‘rip’, involving the same themes. Verbs and translation equivalents are mainly used transitively, but limited ergative use is also observed, including the figurative use of heaven (15, German Himmel, French ciel). ‘Tear’ and ‘rip’ are no prototypical examples of cross- linguistic ergative constructions, since this can barely be exemplified in Dutch and Danish.

4.6. burn

Table 67 – Frequently used mediums with ‘burn’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘burn’ burn verbrennen brûler verbranden forbrænde 1 calories 1 Kalorien 3 bois 1 calorieën 1 kalorier 2 coal 8 Fett 14 peau 8 vet 8 fedt 3 wood 3 Holz 15 maison 18 koolhydraten 19 glukose 4 candle 9 Hexe 16 voiture 3 hout 11brændstof equi: 3-- 5 fire 10 Wasserstoff 7 corps 12 aardgas 18 kulhydrat 6 forest 11 Treibstoff 5 feu 11 brandstof 20 alkohol score/rank 7 body 12 Erdgas 1 calories 13 olie 21 gas 23/11 8 fat 13 Öl 17 flamme 23 - 22 energi

Ergative alternations are cross-linguistically limited to a diet theme e.g. calories (1), fat (8), carbohydrates (18, Dutch koolhydraten, Danish kulhydrat) etc. and a fuel theme e.g. coal (2), wood (3), fuel (11, German Treibstoff, Dutch brandstof, Danish brændstof ), hydrogen (10 German Wasserstoff) and others. Fire (5) and flame (17, French flame) accompany the ‘burn’-ing. People tend to ‘burn’ too e.g. body (7), witch (9, German Hexe) and France seems to have a problem with cars (16, French voiture) catching fire, a local custom that frequently makes the news.

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5. {‘play’,’run’,’move’,’download’} cluster

There are no data on this semantic cluster in Levin (1993) except a reference to music and game as collocates of play. Many of the uses and meanings observed are recent computer and internet era developments which have progressively become common in the new millennium.

5.1. play

Table 68 – Frequently used mediums with ‘play’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘play’ play spielen (se) jouer spelen spille 1 game 2 Musik 1 jeu 1 spel 18 kamp 2 music 1 Spiel 2 musique 2 muziek 2 musik 3 song 9 Zeit 12 finale 17 band 1 spil equi: 3- 4 video 10 Stück 13 partie 5 gitaar 3 sang 5 guitar 7 Klavier 14 personnage 20 19 nummer 6 media 5 Gitarre 15 match 21 16 instrument score/rank 7 piano 3 Lied 16 instrument 22 5 guitar 23/10 8 film 11 Geschichte 10 pièce 23 17 band

Ergative alternations with ‘play’ are limited to [1] a music and media theme e.g. music (2), song (3), video (4), guitar (5), media (6), piano (7), film (8), piece (10, German Stück, French piece), instrument (16, French instrument, Danish instrument), band (17, Dutch band, Danish band) and [2] a (digital) game theme e.g. game (1), final (12 French finale), match (15, French match). Some mediums appear consistently in all five languages making this a limited but more recent prototypical application of the alternations under investigation.

5.2. run

Table 69 – Frequently used mediums with ‘run’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘run’ run ausführen (s’) exécuter draaien køre 1 program 9 Befehl 13 script 16 muziek 1 program 2 water 10 Bewegung 1 program 17 wiel 19 maskine 3 server 11 Aktion 9 commande 1 software 20 system 4 application 9 Kommando 1 logiciel 1 programma 27 equi:1- 5 project 3 Server 9 ordre 23 28 6 game 12 Code 14 danse 24 29 score/rank 7 course 21 9 instruction 25 30 31/25 8 show 22 15 windows 26 31

The use of ‘run’ has been ergativized in recent times since it has taken on a meaning associated with executing mediums related to computer programs e.g. program, software (1), application (4), digital game (6), script (13, French script), code (12, German code), command (9 German Kommando, Befehl, French commande), windows (15, French windows) etc. ‘Run’ also developed a new meaning referring to the working of computer media e.g. server (3), system (20 Danish system). Other mediums may be atypical uses limited to just one application in one language e.g. water (2) in English. Dutch ‘draaien’ shows up as a translation equivalent, but ‘run’ is a much better and generally accepted loan verb in Dutch expressing this recent expansion of the meaning of ‘run’ and this is probably also the case in Danish.

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5.3. move

Table 70 – Frequently used mediums with ‘move’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘move’ move (sich) bewegen bouger (zich) verplaatsen bevæge 1 object 9 Lippe 15 doigt 8 lucht 1 objekt 2 hand 10 Mensch 7 chose 17 zand 15 finger 3 family 11 Erde 9 lèvre 18 gewicht 2 hånd 4 body 12 Bein 12 jambe 1 object 14 arm equi: 2+ 5 car 13 Kopf 13 tête 16 cursor 13 hoved 6 people 1 Objekt 2 main 19 focus 21 mund score/rank 7 thing 14 Auge 14 bras 1 voorwerp 22 fod 23/12 8 air 7 Ding 16 curseur 20 map 23 tunge

‘Move’ is often used cross-linguistically with the same mediums, but the frequency of use of the mediums mostly differs from language to language. Themes include [1] observable objects e.g. object (1), thing (7), car (5), air (8), sand (11, German Erde, Dutch zand) and [2] people, body and multiple body parts e.g. hand (2), body (4), lip (9, German Lippe, French lèvre), leg (13, German Bein, French jambe), head (13, German Kopf, French tête, Danish hoved), eye (14, German Auge), people (6), man (10, German Mensch), finger (15, French doigt, Danish finger), arm (14, French bras, Danish arm), mouth (21, Danish mund), foot (22, Danish fod), tongue (23, Danish tunge). In the anticausative objects and body parts seemingly move or have moved by themselves. Digital influence and extension of the meaning can be observed in cursor (16, French curseur, Dutch cursor) and mouse (less frequent).

5.4. download

Table 71 – Frequently used mediums with ‘download’ across languages Meaning English German French Dutch Danish ‘download’ download herunterladen télécharger downloaden downloade 1 ebook 2 Pdf 8 fichier 11 formulier 8 fil 2 pdf 5 Video 7 application 7 app 16 software 3 song 8 Datei 2 pdf 8 bestand 18 porno 4 book 7 App 7 appli 16 software 7 app equi: 3- 5 video 1 eBook 13 programme 17 muziek 19 rapport 6 movie 10 Treiber 5 vidéo 2 pdf 5 video score/rank 7 app 11 Formular 14 paquet 12 document 17 musik 19/4 8 file 12 Dokument 15 jeu 13 programma 12 dokument

‘Download’ (and ‘upload’) are new concepts, and the media linked to it all are related to using computers and digital media. The use of the same mediums has spread cross-linguistically making ‘download’ an excellent prototypical example of the expansion of digital events that just need to be instigated to process the mediums involved, performing this consequently seemingly independently including signaling the completion of the process. Most frequently used mediums are pdf (2) (an output format for documents), app (7) (short for application) and file (8) (a digital container that can be copied, pasted, deleted, opened, closed, moved, downloaded, uploaded etc. and once instigated performs all these action without further help).

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6. Overviews

6.1 Translation equivalents correspondence ranking

Table 72 – Translation equivalents correspondence ranking Meaning Score Equi Cross-Rank Cross-Rank Cross-Rank Cross-Rank Equi Freq Avg1 Avg2 ‘open’ 16 3- 1 4 ‘more 2.5 ‘begin’ 16 3 2 1 prototypical’ ‘change’ 18 2++ 3 6 6 ‘download’ 19 3- 4 ? ? ‘close’ 20 3- 5 8 9.5 ‘shut’ 20 3- 6 11 ‘start’ 22 3- 7 2 8.77 ‘stop’ 22 3- 8 9 6 ‘improve’ 22 3-- 9 7 ‘play’ 23 3- 10 3 ‘burn’ 23 3-- 11 19 ‘move’ 23 2++ 12 13 13.2 ‘decrease’ 23 2+ 13 21 ‘increase’ 23 2 14 10 ‘develop’ 24 2+ 15 5 ‘end’ 25 2+ 16 15 12 ‘break’ 26 2++ 17 16 ‘tear’ 27 2++ 18 22 ‘turn’ 27 2 19 12 16.64 ‘finish’ 28 2+ 20 18 18.6 ‘continue’ 28 1++ 21 17 ‘rip’ 28 1- 22 24 ‘split’ 31 2-- 23 20 ‘less ‘crack’ 31 1++ 24 23 19 prototypical’ ‘run’ 31 1- 25 14

Table 71 presents a ranking (column Cross-Rank Equi) of the verb uses cross-linguistically on the basis of the translations correspondence scores (columns Score and Equi), calculated as explained at the beginning of this section. This ranking is compared to the frequency ranking of the uses (column

Cross-Rank freq, see also table 12). In the last columns (Cross Rank Avg1 and Avg2) averages are calculated per segment of adjacent translation equivalents correspondences. On the one hand, the data indicate there is some relation between the general frequency of the use of verbs and the number of crosslinguistic ergative correspondences, in other words the more frequent verbs with specific meanings are used, the higher the chance they develop lexicogrammatical units with mediums that can function in ergative alternations. This hypothesis would of course need further research and for now it is unclear whether this actually bears any meaning. This might fit in a broader account of frequent use of collocates generating prototypical semantic units.

On the other hand, I do not see an obvious relationship between the meaning and the frequency of verbs in the context of mixed corpora. I suspect such a relationship is related to specific contexts, jargons, styles and types of language use.

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6.2 Cross-cluster comparison of frequently used mediums in ergative alternations Table 73 – Cross-cluster comparison of frequently used mediums in ergative alternations

Medium

’

´

’

,project

’

’

’

’

’

’

’

’ ey

’

’

’

’

’

’ ’

’

’

’ ’ ’

door eyes window store mouth gate school file train program contest

´ ´ ´ ´ ´ ´ ´ ´ ´work ´process ’ ´year ´week ´day ´life ´career ´season ´car ´ ´engine ´war ´ ´journ ´ ´game ‘open’ X X X X X X X X ‘close’ X X X X X X X X ‘shut’ X X X X X X ‘begin’ X X X X X X X X X ‘start’ X X X X X X X X X X X X X X ‘stop’ X X X X X X X X X ‘end’ X X X X X X X X X X X ‘finish’ X X X X X X X X X X X

‘continue’ X X X X X X X X

Medium ’

’

’

on

’

’

’

,process

’

’

’

’

’

sion

’

’

’

’

´rule,law ´producti ´risk ´health ´quality ´performance ´cost ´number ´project ´emis ´life ´world ´climate ´head ´tace ´game ‘change’ X X X X X X ‘turn’ X X X X ‘develop’ X X X ‘increase’ X X X ‘improve’ X X X X X X ‘decrease’ X X X

Medium

’

on

’

,tend

’

’

’

’

’

’

’

’

’

’

’

ice

´heart ´glass ` ´tooth ´nut ´party´ ´atom ´ligament `condom ´calories ´fat ´wood ´clothes `DVD,CD, ´music,video ‘break’ X X X X ‘crack’ X X ‘rip’ X X X X ‘split’ X X ‘tear’ X X X ‘burn’ X X X

Medium

’

’

’

’

’

,app

hing

,process

’

,t

’

’

’

’

´object ´

´project ´head ´finger parts ´body ´file,pdf ´program ´guitar ´music,video ´game ‘play’ X X X ‘run’ X X ‘move’ X X X X X ‘download’ X X X X Gray highlighted cells indicate cross-cluster frequent use of mediums

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The last table of this section exploring the cross-linguistic semantics of ergative alternations showcases the use of the most frequently used mediums in ergative alternations across semantic cluster boundaries.

For the most part, frequently used mediums are embedded in a semantic cluster. Mediums can either allow a number of alternative events, as clearly shows in the {‘open’,’close’,’shut’} and {‘begin’,’start’,’stop’,’end’,’finish’,’continue’} clusters, or they can have a special bond with a verb meaning, generating a specific meaning that licenses a more unique verb/medium combination where substitution of either verb or medium by a ‘synonym’ or ‘translation equivalent’ would lead to resistance from native speakers, mainly because they have specific associations of this combination in their mind. This interpretation can be observed especially in the {‘break’,’crack’,’rip’,’split’,’tear’,’burn’} cluster.

Ergativity expands in all languages, as more mediums emerge mainly due to new developments in different domains of human progress, consequently reflecting in new language usage and creation, especially in the digital world we have all become part of in the last twenty years. This is exemplified in the {‘play’,’run’,’move’,’download’} cluster.

Some mediums appear cross-cluster-wise e.g. the abstract notions process and project and digital mediums like game, program, music, video, CD and DVD. The only concept that has been around for a long time is life itself. All these concepts have been empowered with events, operations, actions and situations, in the process expanding the meanings of verbs and nouns. We attempt to steer them in a direction of our choice, after which they are often supposed to act on themselves, with their own causation and intrinsic force, happening seemingly all by itself, spontaneously. As mentioned before, this is the way we present those things, it is often not factual : most of it is still a consequence of human intervention and technology.

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Part 4 – Conclusions

Fascinated by the concept of lexical ergativity I investigated causative-anticausative alternations in datasets translated back and forth between the five languages of my research. The original sets were in English and consisted of [NP VP NP] / [NP VP] alternations without further context but with selected mediums functioning as subject in the intransitive clause and as object in the transitive clause. These sets were entered twice, using first simple present and then present perfect tense. This experimental setting is embedded in a functional heuristic approach of studying lexicogrammar64 in specific clausal alternations.

This study compared a set of 25 frequently occurring verbal meanings that were selected by matching corpora based verb frequency lists linked to an extensive list of English labile verbs cross- linguistically, expecting potential lexical ergativity cross-linguistically since lexical ergativity is linked to the meaning of medium-verb collocates and not just to the verbs, a view generally accepted by functional linguists. Thus it is reasonable to expect that languages that share meanings through translation equivalents would showcase this also, possibly with different means since the lexicogrammar of each language involves both differences and similarities.

I used machine translation to render the data. I could have used parallel corpora, but since these also consist of translated datasets, the results should be similar, and I preferred this innovative approach as recent improved results of machine translation technology entices to do so. Machine translation using advanced neural machine technology works on the basis of a huge and varied repository of documents including all types of language use, written and spoken, formal and informal, rendering translations on the basis of sophisticated algorithms that involve frequency of use and context. As such the data obtained should be representative.

The aim of this research was to answer these questions:

What are the main and alternative ergative strategies of English, German, French, Dutch and Danish? How important/productive is each strategy in each language? How do they compare? How do they translate? How much (in)consistency does this involve? To what extent does meaning in a general or specific lexical context play a role? and Is there anything in this comparison that sheds new light on lexical ergativity?

These are the conclusions.

1. The main strategies

In English the default strategy is lability using labile verbs, both in simple present and present perfect. This conclusion is based on observations of the datasets after translating them back from the four other languages. Other tenses appear (simple past, present continuous), but this does not affect the ergative strategy. In German, Dutch and Danish lability with labile verbs is also the main strategy in simple present clauses while in French labile and anticausative strategies with se insertion in the intransitive clause are about equally important. Clauses in a perfective alternation promote or switch strategies in all languages but English. In French and German the anticausative strategy with clitic insertion becomes the main strategy.

64 A term coined by Michael Halliday, Thibault, Paul J.; van Leeuwen, Theo (1996-04-01). "Grammar, society, and the speech act: Renewing the connections". Journal of Pragmatics. 25 (4): 561–585. 108

In Dutch and Danish either present perfect with ‘be’, expressing completed action, or ‘be’ + past participle, readable as ‘be’ + predicative adjective and expressing resultative state, become the default strategy.

2. Alternative strategies

Pragmatically, language users can choose alternatives, if they are available, similar, loaded with the same message but with a different tune and serving their purposes. In English, instead of expressing completion of the action in intransitive clauses, there is always the option of expressing the resulting state, using be + past participle, readable as be + predicative adjective or using a passive simple present, which is also built using be + past participle, implying either the completed event or the result of the action with an unmentioned or implied agent, or with the agent mentioned in a by-clause. The same strategy is available in German, Dutch and Danish where it is, according to the data, used more frequently as an ergative alternative than in English. French uses by default its passé composé, the equivalent of a present perfect with ‘be’ auxiliary, often -dependent on the verbs used- in combination with the se insertion. In German, Dutch and Danish intransitive clauses, eventive passives using an auxiliary expressing this state sometimes emerge as a possible alternative, but they seem to change the perspective of the original clause too much to be included as true alternatives. They should be included in a discussion of pragmatics and language use in general though. In Danish, there is a concurrent option -also dependent on the verb- to add an s-suffix to the simple present in an intransitive clause confirming the patientlike role of the subject. Causative strategies have been observed, in German, Dutch and Danish with prefixed verbs in causative sentences, and in French with the addition of a causal ,but these strategies are not frequently applied in our datasets. Moreover, there are always labile or anticausative alternatives available and the same applies to equipollent strategies, that only occurred once or twice in English and German. Suppletive strategies were not included in this account. There were no ‘die/kill’-type of pairs in our selection. One could consider every synonym of a translation equivalent as suppletive when it emerges in the translation of an alternation only once, either in the transitive or the intransitive clause. In that case there are potentially many of them. I did not count them, neither investigated whether they were transitive, intransitive or ambitransitive. This could be the focus of further research.

3. Importance of strategies

Since Jespersen linguists have exemplified that the labile strategy has been expanding in English. As I exemplified, it has become very productive in recent times with new language and new applications. Beke (2014) showed that ergative strategies have continually been expanding in Dutch in the last 800 years. This research clearly builds a case of ergative strategies being present cross-linguistically and able to express the same concepts and the same meanings with the same verbs and the same mediums. There is a clear relationship between the aspect of the verb and the strategy implemented. In present tense all languages can express this with labile verbs, and although not all to the same extent, it is either the default or the major strategy. When expressing a perfective aspect, all languages have their major strategy and one or a few alternatives. Notwithstanding the many variants this research has distinguished, in all languages two concurrent and/or complementary strategies per tense aspect cover most of the implementations and all possible alternatives are

109 complementary and somewhat different in one or another aspect or property. Since this is a synchronic study, I did not consider the diachronic evolution of these phenomena, yet a hypothesis for future research would be, that the main strategies are expanding to become default with a growing number of verbs and collocate mediums in every language.

4. Comparison of strategies

I exemplified that ergative strategies are not only linked to the meaning of verbs and collocates, but also to aspect and voice. However, the implementations differ. English retains active voice when alternating causatively/anticausatively including have consistently as perfective auxiliary when expressing completion of actions. The other languages only do so in causative clauses if ‘have’ is available. If not, they switch to ‘be’ both in causative clauses and anticausative clauses. When using ‘be’ in an intransitive clause, syncretisms could emerge between ‘present perfect’ with ‘be’ and ‘be’ + past participle either read as ‘be + predicative adjective’ or ‘simple present passive’. Dutch and Danish are often in this situation, German somewhat less. One could say these languages frequently balance on the edge of passive and active voice, with context or interpretation necessary to decide whether an eventive state, a resultative state or a completed action is intended. English and French can express these distinctions too, but they do not emerge in this research since tense formation and either labile or anticausative use occur more consistently, both with simple or perfect aspect.

5. Translation and (in)consistencies

Though there are of course issues with machine translation, this is a promising new approach. This methodology, using three state of the art online translation systems and translating back and forth between all languages, has rendered many inconsistencies and consistencies. I have marked, interpreted, excluded, processed and edited all materials consistently and minutely, using all language skills and relational database techniques available to me. I’m looking forward to all evaluations and will appreciate all comments and corrections.

6. The role of context

One cannot study lexical ergativity only taking verb meanings into account. Verbs may have a basic meaning, but as exemplified multiple times, they get their precise meaning through their participants (mainly configurated NPs including subjects and all types of objects) and through additional constituents of the VPs themselves (e.g. affixes, auxiliaries, construction words etc.) In the context of lexical ergativity the role of the medium can not be underestimated as it licenses, limits or rejects the semantics of the collocation with the verb. I investigated cross-linguistic collocates and not only observed prototypes, translation equivalents and semantic themes present in all five languages, but also exemplified the limits of each collocation studied. Expansion of the data with NP VP PP clauses, using the same methodology, would be the next step.

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7. New insights

The methodology used is experimental and heuristic. It certainly can be improved further. The selection of data was limited to keep it manageable with regard to time available. More languages could be compared, the number of verbs, mediums and clauses could be extended. Tenses, aspects and diathesis could be added. More context could be involved.

Still, this research has developed a detailed comparative account of functional lexicogrammatical features in relation to lexical ergativity, including a discussion of new methodologies involving web based corpora, neural machine translation, database techniques, frequency, the semantics of collocations and the syntax of ambitransitive alternations. It has added to the embedding, description and typology of lexical ergativity.

Data including collocates, tense, aspect and diathesis have extended the understanding of this linguistic concept in a functional framework.

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