Valenzalternation im Vergleich: Antikausativa im Deutschen, Französischen und Ungarischen

Abstract

In his typology of inchoative-causative verb alternation, Haspelmath (1993) argues for a preference of the anticausative type in European languages. In this article, alternation pairs in German, French and Hungarian are considered on this basis. For this purpose, the list of verbs or metalinguistic concepts is used, which Haspelmath arranges along a spontaneity scale. This method of using the meta-linguistic concept list as a basis for comparison, which was applied by Haspelmath (1993) and is widely used in language typology research, is critically scrutinized and its applicability examined. In addition to elicitations and dictionaries, corpus queries are also used as a data basis. The study thus provides critical insights into the tension between a large-scale typological study and a more in-depth examination of linguistic structural phenomena in individual languages. While the individual language results for German and the diachronic findings for Hungarian generally tend to support Haspelmath's thesis of the spontaneity scale, a more detailed individual language analysis of French shows that Haspelmath's morphological typology of alternation pair formation must be extended to include a further type, the anticausative-labile type. The data presented thus also provide interesting new results for the areal typology of Europe.