ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses causatives and transitives and how the demise of the morphological causative and the transitive at the end of the Old English period impacts verbs. It examines valency marking in general and in Old English in particular and show how transitivizing and detransitivizing strategies can be accommodated using a vP-shell. The chapter describes some changes in the marking of causative valency in the history of English and in the marking of transitive verbs. It talks about a table in the spirit of Nichols et al. The chapter also discusses the changes affecting the transitive verbs. It indicates how transitivity and perfective aspect are marked morphologically in Old English and also indicates that this morphology is lost and that this results in an increase in transitive verbs. In Old English a suffix derives causatives by adding a Causer to the Theme of the unaccusative verb and a prefix derives transitives from unergatives.
