Causalness, frequency, diachrony and the causal–noncausal alternation in Italian and Spanish

Cross-linguistic work on the causal–noncausal alternation has shown that there exists a strong correlation between the frequency of use of a given verb in causal versus noncausal contexts and its preferred coding pattern for the alternation, with verbs typically occurring in causal contexts preferably selecting the anticausative pattern. These studies assume that the correlation between frequency and coding is diachronic, but this assumption has so far not been tested on historical data. This paper aims to fill this gap, by contrastively exploring the interplay between frequency effects and the coding of the causal–noncausal alternation in diachronic corpora of Italian and Spanish. By resorting to inferential statistic techniques, our findings largely confirm the hypothesis advanced by frequentist approaches, while at the same time also offering a more nuanced understanding of the role of frequency, which is only one among several factors that shape speakers’ choice of anticausativization patterns in Romance languages.