Anticausativization in Gyalrongic languages

This article presents a comprehensive survey of anticausativization within Gyalrongic languages, a group of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Sichuan, China, contributing significantly to our understanding of this phenomenon's theoretical and diachronic underpinnings. The research affirms that anticausative alternation is predominantly associated with verbs that exhibit a change of state semantics. This categorization includes decausative and autocausative verbs, further subdivided in Gyalrongic languages into specific semantic groups such as Separation, Removal, Physical Transformation, etc. Certain verbs with agent-oriented meanings also undergo anticausative alternation, calling for a revision of previous claims. Gyalrongic languages demonstrate a unique trend in their use of anticausative marking, deviating from global patterns by avoiding the polyfunctional employment of these markers. The article traces the origins of anticausative marking to a spontaneous / non-volitional action prefix and identifies the emergence of a new non-volitional prefix that has overtones of anticausative marking, descending from an orientational / TAME prefix.