THE ROLE OF ARGUMENT STRUCTURE IN THE DERIVATION OF CAUSATIVE VERB FORMS
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The authoress suggests that an analysis of causative constructions relying solely on the argument structure of the verbs involved may resolve a number of problems that have not been (satisfactorily) resolved so far. On the basis of the behavior of arguments it can be stated, first of all, that causative - (t)At is not a 'mere' derivational suffix in Hungarian, but rather, a derivational suffix that has its own agentive argument, its subject. The argument structures of the three classes of verbs, unergative (agentive intransitive), unaccusative (non-agentive intransitive, 'middle'), and transitive, make it possible to determine which verbs may participate in causative derivation: only unergatives and transitives may be input to causativization, since only these types of verbs have an agentive argument, the only argument type that can be made by the agent of the suffix to perform some action. An investigation of causative verb forms additionally reveals that both the unergative and the transitive class include smaller or larger subgroups that exhibit unexpected behavior - that is, those two classes are far from being homogeneous.
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