Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Cut and break verbs in Sranan

2007; De Gruyter Mouton; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1515/cog.2007.011

1613-3641

James Essegbey,

Phonetics and Phonology Research

Guerssel et al. (1985) propose that crosslinguistically, separation verbs group into cut verbs and break verbs based on their meaning. This meaning supposedly affects the constructions in which the verbs occur, e.g., only break verbs are expected to participate in the causative/inchoative alternation. In Sranan, a verb that superficially looks like ‘cut’ in English is actually a break verb. Also, not only break verbs participate in the causative/inchoative alternation, as expected, but cut verbs do also. I argue that the intransitive use of cut verbs does not yield a passive construction as proposed by some; instead, it is inchoative.