The Causative Alternation in Bulgarian

Certain causative verbs can be used both transitively and intransitively with the transitive form roughly meaning ‘cause to V-intransitive’ (Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 1995: 79). The two variants are not necessarily realized by the same morphological form, but they have the same semantic relationship. The object of the transitive and the subject of the intransitive bear the same semantic role. 1. Antonia opened the door. / The door opened. (Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 1995: 79) This phenomenon has been attested cross- linguistically, for example in English (Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 1995) and Romance languages (Bentley, 2006). This study examines the causative alternation in Bulgarian, which behaves similarly to the Romance languages, in that in some cases the intransitive verb bears a reflexive morpheme: 2. Aleks otvori vratata. Alex opened door-DEF. ‘Alex opened the door.’ 3. Vratata se otvori. Door-DEF REFL opened. ‘The door opened.’ Drawing on previous work on the topic, the present study aims to determine the constraints on verbs participating in the causative alternation in Bulgarian, accounting for why some verbs alternate, while others do not. It also discusses the role of the reflexive morpheme se and its relation to these constraints.