‘Smash it again, Sam’: Verbs of cutting and breaking in Jalonke

This paper investigates the semantic and syntactic properties of cutting and breaking verbs in Jalonke. Semantic features relevant for these Jalonke verbs are control of the effector over the locus of impact, subcategorization for specific manners/instruments, and the theme being a whole vs. already detached from an entity. The latter distinction is unattested in other languages. Syntactically, the verbs fall into two classes: cut verbs with a transitive argument structure, and break verbs with causative and inchoative argument structure options. The existence of a class of exclusively transitive break verbs, despite the existence of the causative/inchoative alternation in Jalonke, is not expected in recent theories of argument structure.