causativeanticausative
Causative-anticausative refers to a diathesis in some languages where a single verb has two related forms that encode opposite valency or participant structure. The causative form expresses that the subject causes an event to occur, typically introducing or increasing transitivity by adding an external causer or agent. The anti-causative (or anticausative) form marks that the event happens without an explicit external causer, often yielding an intransitive or patient-focused reading in which the subject undergoes a change of state or experiences the event.
In practice, languages realize this opposition in diverse ways. The causative may be built with morphological
Semantically, the causative is used when an agent intentionally brings about an event or state, whereas the
Causative-anticausative patterns are of interest in typology and historical linguistics, where they shed light on how