Action/Result in Indonesian Accomplishment Verbs and the Agent Control Hypothesis

In this paper, I document and analyze the strong link between the agentivity of the external argument of causative accomplishment verbs and their non-culminating interpretations in Indonesian. Descriptively, I present a wide range of novel examples in Indonesian from my original fieldwork to support the crosslinguistic robustness of the so-called Agent Control Hypothesis. Theoretically, adapting the recent approach developed by Martin to Indonesian, I propose that the relevant link is accounted for by the interaction of the different number of sub-events in agentive versus non-agentive causation (namely, the agent's action + theme's result state sub-events in the former versus only the theme's result state sub-event in the latter) with the Maximal Stage Requirement of the partitive perfective operator pfvM.