Yiddish Causal-Noncausal Alternation in Areal Perspective

Abstract

Languages differ in the way they code causal-noncausal alternations, in which an event is presented as either having an external causer or happening by itself. Some languages make no distinction between the two situations, while others make a morphosyntactic distinction. Yiddish, a Germanic language, differs from other genealogically close Germanic varieties: Yiddish codes causal-noncausal alternation similarly to the coterritorial Slavic languages with which it was in contact, for instance Polish and Russian. The two tendencies that make Yiddish similar to the Slavic languages in this respect are the rise of anticausative marking (direct calquing) and the development of a causative (preference for overt marking).