According to the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978), intransitive verbs fall in two distinct classes: the <strong>unaccusatives</strong> (whose subjects originate as direct objects) and the <strong>unergatives</strong> (whose subjects originate as subjects). Although there are studies of split intransitivity in Modern Japanese and European languages, very few exist for earlier stages of Japanese. To fill in part of this gap, this thesis presents a comprehensive investigation of split intransitivity in Old Japanese (largely, 8th century Japanese). The descriptive and analytic work of this research is based on the newly developed ‘Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese’ (OCOJ). It consists of original and romanized Old Japanese texts, with a wide range of information including the original orthography, part-of-speech, morphology and syntactic constituency in the form of XML tags following TEI conventions. It is part of a larger collaborative research project: ‘Verb semantics and argument realization in pre-modern Japanese: A comprehensive study of the basic syntax of pre-modern Japanese’, in which my DPhil project is situated. As part of my DPhil project, I took part in the analysis and tagging of the OCOJ, in addition to contributing to translation. My original contribution to knowledge is a comprehensive investigation and in-depth analysis of the lexical-semantic aspects of split intransitivity in relation to its morpho-syntactic expressions in Old Japanese. This includes: exploring to what extent intransitive verbs could be classified as unaccusative and unergative, what factors are involved in the classification, how they interact, what are the possible ways of representation, and the theoretical implications it brings to linguistic theory in general. Syntactically, I looked into manifestations specific to Old Japanese (e.g. perfective auxiliary selection), and also examined to what extent diagnostics – which show split intransitivity in English, Italian and Modern Japanese (e.g. N+V compounding and resultative construction) – could be applied to Old Japanese. Semantically, I investigated various semantic factors and proposed basic and complex models of the interaction between intentionality and affectedness in Old Japanese. I also proposed a ‘complex format for representing simple event structures’ which enhances the understanding of semantic aspects of split intransitivity. As such, the results of my research not only contribute to a detailed understanding of Old Japanese verbs, but also have implications for linguistic theory in general.

abstract: This thesis offers a contrastive analysis of the causative alternation phenomenon in English and Standard Arabic variety. This phenomenon has received a lot of attention in the literature on argument structure. It has traditionally been presented in terms of the causativization of inchoative verbs/unaccusatives. It is argued here that this analysis conflicts with the way the causative alternation is molded in Arabic. Causative alternation in Arabic is not only limited to inchoative verbs, but it incorporates unergative verbs as well, which play a vital role in this alternation. The implication of this observation is that the different syntactic behaviors between English and Arabic may reflect people’s different perception of events and lead to different syntactic computation. Therefore, this thesis highlights the role of this subset of intransitives/anti-causatives in the Arabic causative alternation and answers one of the highly considered questions on the causative alternation; that is, which version of the alternation is the lexical base, and which one is derived? This thesis also reveals that there is some significant difference between English and Arabic in terms of the alternatability of unaccusative verbs. Therefore, this study shows that most of the Arabic unaccusative verbs, except denominal verbs, have a causative alternant. This thesis also addresses the vital role of the Arabic verbal template in clarifying this phenomenon. In sum, this thesis provides an overview of the semantic, syntactic, and morphological properties of Arabic verbs undergoing the causative alternation. Besides employing the researcher’s native-speaker intuition, the English/Arabic Lexicon Dictionary and Arabicorpora are consulted to support the validity of the argument. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2015