Frontmatter -- Table of contents -- Introduction -- I. Standard Japanese -- 1 The semantic basis of Japanese transitiveintransitive derivational patterns -- 2. Phonological and semantic subregularities in noncausative-causative verb pairs in Japanese -- 3. Agents in anticausative and decausative compound verbs -- 4. Valency and case alternations in Japanese -- 5. The role of lexical semantics in the reorganization of the resultative construction -- II. Dialects and Ryukyuan -- 6. Anticausativization in the northern dialects of Japanese -- 7. Aspect and non-canonical object marking in the Irabu dialect of Ryukyuan -- III. History -- 8. Japanese transitivity pairs through time - a historical and typological perspective -- 9. The historical source of the bigrade transitivity alternations in Japanese -- IV. Acquisition -- 10. Children's 'erroneous' intransitives, transitives, and causatives: their implications for syntactic theory -- 11. Children's use of morphosyntax and argument structure to infer the meaning of novel transitive and intransitive verbs -- 12. The effect of a 'conceptualizable' agent on the use of transitive and intransitive constructions in L2 Japanese -- V. Beyond Japanese -- 13. "Ambivalent voice": markedness effects in valency change -- 14. Quantitative tests of implicational verb hierarchies -- 15. The role of morphology in valency alternation phenomena -- Appendix A: List of core transitivity pairs in Japanese (by Yo Matsumoto, a revision of Jacobsen (1992)) -- Appendix B: List of additional transitivity pairs in Japanese (by Yo Matsumoto, a revision of Jacobsen (1992)) -- Subject index