Cennamo, M. 2021. Anticausatives and lability in Italian and French: a diachronic-synchronic study

This article explores the interplay of the event structure template of verbs with the verb’s inherent meaning (the ‘root’) and the nature of the subject (e.g., animacy and control) in shaping the distribution of the different strategies available to mark anticausativization – the active intransitive (i.e. lability) and the reflexive (se) – in Italian and French, both diachronically and synchronically, in light of their Latin antecedents, the -r form, the reflexive and the active intransitive. It is shown that both in Italian and French se comes to be gradually associated with verbs lexicalizing telic change, interacting with the voice domain, starting from the alternation between the reflexive and the active intransitive in Old Italian, and from the active intransitive as the sole/main anticausative strategy in Old French. The aspectual specification of verbs also affects the synchronic distribution of the anticausative strategies, with the reflexive being not only a marker of thematic reduction, but also signalling in some of its uses the presence of a final goal/result or target state in the lexical meaning of a verb, occurring with verbs lexically encoding a scalar change, either in all their uses or in some of them.