Causative/Inchoative Verb Alternation in Altaic Languages: Turkish, Turkmen, Nanai and Mongolian

The purpose of the study is two-fold. First, a statistical analysis of the morphology of causative/inchoative verb alternation is carried out in Japanese and in 13 Altaic languages, i.e., Turkish, Turkmen, Nanai, Khakas, Udihe, Uzbek, Sakha, Manchu, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Kazakh, Ewen, and Azerbaijani. The findings reveal that causative/inchoative verb alternation (a) can be realised via the insertion of an infix (‘-uul-’, ‘-e-’, ‘-g-’, etc.); (b) can be inchoative root-based, with transitive verbs derived via attaching a suffix to the inchoative verb roots (‘-dur-’, ‘-t-’, ‘-ir-’, ‘-dyr-’, ‘-wəən-’, ‘-buwəən-’, ‘-r-’, ‘-wənə-’, ‘-nar-’, ‘-ier-’, ‘-er-’, ‘-bu-’, ‘-ʊkan-’); (c) can be causative verb-based, with inchoative verbs being derived via attaching a suffix to the causative verb roots (‘-p-’, ‘-n-’, ‘-ul-’, ‘-il-’); and (d) can be realised via consonant alternation (‘-r-’ (transitive) / ‘-n-’ (intransitive); ‘-t-’ (transitive) / ‘-n-’ (intransitive)). This study further attempts to pin down the affiliation of these languages with the Japanese language. It compares the morphological findings with Japanese bound morphemes in causative/inchoative verb alternation and then delves into the phonological issues, i.e., consonant alternation and vowel harmony. A proposal is put forward: phonologically and morphologically, Japanese has a good deal of resemblance to the 13 Altaic languages.


(4) Nanai
It appears that the alternation in Nanai is of two patterns, i.e., (i) inchoative verbs are the base, causative verbs are derived via attaching a suffix to the inchoative verb roots; or (ii) causative verbs are the base, inchoative verbs are derived via attaching a suffix to the causative verb roots.

(6) Udihe
The alternation in Udihe has three patterns, i.e., (i) causative and inchoative verbs take different stems but share the same suffix; (ii) inchoative verbs are the base, causative verbs are derived via attaching a suffix to the inchoative verb roots; (iii) causative and inchoative verbs share the same word form. In Kyrgyz, the alternation of causative/inchoative verbs is realised via two ways: (a) consonant alternation ('-t-' (transitive) with '-n-' (intransitive)); (b) inchoative verbs are the base and transitive verbs are derived via attaching a suffix to the inchoative verb roots ('-t-', '-er-').

(13) Azerbaijani
The alternation of causative/inchoative verbs seem to be realised in two ways: (a) consonant alternation (/t/ (causative) with /n/ (inchoative)); (b) inchoative verbs are the base, causative verbs are derived by attaching the suffix /t/ or /ir/ to the inchoative verb roots. As agglutinative languages, morphology plays an essential role in Altaic languages. Despite that the above data are limited, they suggest the following rules: a. Causative/inchoative verb alternation can be realised via the insertion of an infix. This pattern is particularly observed in Mongolian, where the infixes are '-uul-', '-e-', '-g-', etc.
b. Causative/inchoative verb alternation can share the same word form, as seen in Turkmen and Udihe. f. Causative and inchoative verbs take different stems but share the same suffix, as seen in Udihe.
This having been said, the above are merely primary findings. This study carries out a corpus-based investigation ijel.ccsenet.org International Journal of English Linguistics Vol. 10, No. 5; 2020 of 13 Altaic languages, delving into the morpho-syntactic features of causative/inchoative verb alternation. With this in place, we compare the alteration patterning, as well as the bound morphemes that convey the alternation, with Japanese, which is also a morphologically agglutinative language, with a transitive/unaccusative verb alternation system rendered by morphemes.
This study aims to pin down the morphological features of causative/inchoative verb alternations in 13 Altaic languages. Building on this, it further explores whether Japanese could be categorised as a member of the Altaic language family.
The data for Turkish, Turkmen, Mongolian, Nanai, Khakas, Udihe, Uzbek, Sakha, Manchu, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Ewen and Azerbaijani are extracted from The World Atlas of Transitivity Pairs, provided by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. The data for Japanese are drawn from the corpus of the BCCWJ (Balanced Corpus of Modern Written Japanese) by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics.
This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 summarises typological work on causative/inchoative verb alternation in the past. Section 3 presents quantified data, delving into the bound morphemes that play an essential role in Altaic languages and in Japanese. Section 4 poses the questions of whether Japanese ought to be alleged as an Altaic language. The geographic, phonological and morphological aspects are addressed. Section 5 highlights the results and concludes the paper.

Previous Work on Causative/Inchoative Verb Alternation
Causative/inchoative verb alternation has been studied intensively in linguistic typological work since 1969 (Nedjalkov and Silnitsky 1973, Jacobsen 1985, Croft 1990, Haspelmath 1993, Kageyama 1996, Comrie 2006. This boom was kicked off by the publication of Nedjalkov (1969), in his paper Nekotorye verojatnostnye universalii v glagol'nom slovoobrazovanii. Cross-linguistic studies of causative/inchoative verb alternation mainly focus on two aspects: (a) synchronically, how morphologically the two forms are related; (b) diachronically, which is the base root and how the other is derived. A great deal of effort has been put in to conducting these inquiries: see, for instance, Masica (1976), who conducted an investigation into the distribution of transitive and intransitive verbs, in an effort to arrive at an understanding of the derivation direction. Haspelmath (1993) observed 20 pairs of transitive/intransitive verbs of different languages and put forward an intra-linguistic and a cross-linguistic path of the derivation. Beth Levin has contributed to the study of verbs from perspectives such as 'lexical conceptual structure', 'event structure', and 'scalar structure ' (1991, 1996, 1998, 2005, 2010, etc.). One contribution that is related to the present study is the 'lexical-semantic'-based proposal: 'manner/result complementarity' (Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2010: 25). According to this proposal, a verb root can only be associated with a single position in an event schema, and since manner and result roots are associated with distinct positions, a verb lexicalises either manner or result. This insight further links to the scalar structure in that result roots specify scalar changes and manner roots do not (Rappaport Hovav Kageyama (1993Kageyama ( , 1996 applies a 'lexical conceptual structure' to the study of Japanese transitivity pairs and proposes that Japanese causative/inchoative verb alternation displays two patterns: 'anticausativisation' and 'decausativisation'. Anticausativisation refers to the object changing in terms of the property of the object itself. The transitive verb takes on an intransitive function via identifying the object and causer, e.g., waru/wareru; yaburu/yabureru, etc. (16) Anticausativisation e.g., waru/wareru; yaburu/yabureru Decausativisation refers to the object changing in terms of external factors. The intransitivisation affix '-ar-' suppresses the causer in the semantic structure and thus, the syntactic structure is covert. Through this manipulation, transitive verbs take on an intransitive function.
NINJAL (2014)  Inspired by WATP's macro classification, the present study delves into a delicate matter, i.e., the bound morphemes that render causative/inchoative verb alternation, and whether Japanese has a phonological and morphological resemblance to the 13 Altaic languages.

Morphological Study of Causative/Inchoative Verb Alternation in Altaic Languages
The targeted 13 languages fall into four genera:

Further Inquiry: Affiliation of Japanese
So far, Section 3 has shed light on the morphological features of Altaic languages' causative/inchoative verb alternation. We are now in a position to verify whether Japanese falls into the Altaic language family.
To begin with, a look at the geographic relationship between Japanese and the targeted 13 Altaic languages appears to be necessary.
The 'Vowel harmony principle' in Modern Mongolian is observed in suffixes and loanwords. Essentially, this involves gender. Ueda (2018) made the following observation: when a loanword's precedent vowel is masculine, a feminine /e/ is required in the suffix; when a loanword's precedent vowel is feminine, a masculine /a/ is required in the suffix. Following this, Old Japanese's two-type vowels would not be referred to as fulfilling the 'vowel harmony principle'. More crucially, Old Japanese is a dead language, therefore even if we admit the existence of the 'vowel harmony principle', no continuity is seen.
This having been said, in Modern Japanese the pronunciation of loanwords presents another picture.
(I). /i/ can render a double vowel with /a/ and /o/, as in (21)

Consonant Alternation
The paper now turns to another phonological phenomenon, i.e., consonant alternation (sequential voicing). To start with, consonant alternation refers to the transition of a consonant from an aspirated sound to a voiced sound. In Japanese, this is known as 'sequential voicing', and is conveyed by noun compounds. Kubozono (1999) indicates that Japanese sequential voicing presents the following rules: Third, from a morpho-syntactic perspective, when two nouns are assigned to a coordinate relation, sequential voicing is prevented. This is illustrated in (28).
(28) a. oya 'parent' + o 'child' → oyako 'parent-child' b. shiro 'white' + kuro 'black' → shirokuro 'white-black' (hand-made examples) The reason for sequential voicing not taking place in the dvandva structure of noun-noun compound may be related to the degree of lexicalisation: lexicalised words are likely to receive sequential voicing.
Finally, the compounding pattern 'object + transitive verb. conjuctive ' does not receive sequential voicing, as exemplified by (29) In Turkish, sequential voicing is limited to three consonants, i.e., ㄷ '/t', ㅂ '/p/' and ㅈ '/ch/', and thus, In light of the fact that Japanese presents similar phonological features (vowel harmony principle and consonant alternation) to Altaic languages (Mongolian and Turkish), perhaps we can now contend that Japanese can be deemed phonologically to be an Altaic language. To identify a language's affiliation, historical facts, cultural facts, and sociological facts ought to be taken into consideration. Nonetheless, this study provides evidence from a typological linguistic point of view, suggesting that Japanese is an Altaic language.

Morphological Issues
Now turning to the morphological issue. There are three forms of alternation in Japanese causative/inchoative verb alternation: (a) vt and vi derive from the same adjective stem, e.g., fukai (Adj)→ FUKAM-ar-u/FUKAM-e-ru; (b) causative and inchoative verbs share the same word form, e.g., HIRA-ku (doa -o-hiraku 'open the door' / doa-ga-hiraku 'the door is open'); (c) a morpheme that indicates vt or vi properties is added to the verb stem (31).