This report investigates the causativization patterns of verbs of eating and drinking from a typological perspective, arguing that ingestive verbs may be grouped together with middle verbs with respect to causativization. It is argued that both ingestive verbs and middle verbs are lexically reflexive and, in some languages, their causative variants are derived from their non-causative variants by an antireflexivization operation that delinks the verbs' coidentified arguments. Evidence from English and Marathi shows that such an operation is plausible as a causativization strategy on both semantic and morphological grounds. / text

The present paper focuses on the problem of reflexivization in Lithuanian and English. The study is based on a corpus of 6718 instances of reflexive constructions in the novel “Sodybų Tuštėjimo Metas” by Jonas Avyžius and their equivalents in the English variant of the text translated by Olga Shartse. The aim of the paper is to describe the semantic patterns that can be expressed by reflexive constructions in Lithuanian and English, and to determine the basic similarities and differences in the employment of reflexivization in the two languages. The analysis is carried out by means of the descriptive method. The results show that both in Lithuanian and English the greatest number of reflexive constructions are used in their primary function, i.e. to mark the coreference of two semantic roles. In both the languages reflexives can be used to mark other meanings than that of semantic reflexivity, but Lithuanian reflexive constructions are in a position to express more meanings. The analysis of the data shows that, in contrast to Lithuanian, in English there is a strong preference for the use of unmarked reflexive constructions rather than for the marked ones in all the semantic patterns. The differences in the use of reflexive constructions in the two languages can be accounted for by the peculiarities of the morphological structure of the languages. In English the reflexive marker is a pronoun with a relatively independent syntactical status, which can be omitted if the context... [to full text]