Table of contents

Introduction

I. Standard Japanese

1. The semantic basis of Japanese transitiveintransitive derivational patterns

2. Phonological and semantic subregularities in noncausative-causative verb pairs in Japanese

3. Agents in anticausative and decausative compound verbs

4. Valency and case alternations in Japanese

5. The role of lexical semantics in the reorganization of the resultative construction

II. Dialects and Ryukyuan

6. Anticausativization in the northern dialects of Japanese

7. Aspect and non-canonical object marking in the Irabu dialect of Ryukyuan

III. History

8. Japanese transitivity pairs through time – a historical and typological perspective

9. The historical source of the bigrade transitivity alternations in Japanese

IV. Acquisition

10. Children’s ‘erroneous’ intransitives, transitives, and causatives: their implications for syntactic theory

11. Children’s use of morphosyntax and argument structure to infer the meaning of novel transitive and intransitive verbs

12. The effect of a ‘conceptualizable’ agent on the use of transitive and intransitive constructions in L2 Japanese

V. Beyond Japanese

13. “Ambivalent voice”: markedness effects in valency change

14. Quantitative tests of implicational verb hierarchies

15. The role of morphology in valency alternation phenomena

Appendix A: List of core transitivity pairs in Japanese (by Yo Matsumoto, a revision of Jacobsen (1992))

Appendix B: List of additional transitivity pairs in Japanese (by Yo Matsumoto, a revision of Jacobsen (1992))

Subject index