The aim of this study was to test the claim that languages universally employ morphosyntactic marking to differentiate events of more‐ versus less‐direct causation, preferring to mark them with less‐ and more‐ overt marking, respectively (e.g., Somebody broke the window vs. Somebody MADE the window break; *Somebody cried the boy vs. Somebody MADE the boy cry). To this end, we investigated whether a recent computational model which learns to predict speakers’ by‐verb relative preference for the two causatives in English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, and K'iche’ Mayan is able to generalize to a sixth language on which it has never been trained: Balinese. Judgments of the relative acceptability of the less‐ and more‐transparent causative forms of 60 verbs were collected from 48 native‐speaking Balinese adults. The composite crosslinguistic computational model was able to predict these judgments, not only for verbs that it had seen, but also––in a split‐half validation test––to verbs that it had never seen in any language. A “random‐semantics” model showed only a relatively small decrement in performance with seen verbs, whose behavior can be learned on a verb‐by‐verb basis, but achieved zero correlation with human judgments when generalizing to unseen verbs. Together, these findings suggest that Balinese conceptualizes directness of causation in a similar way to these unrelated languages, and therefore constitute support for the view that the distinction between more‐ versus less‐distinct causation constitutes a morphosyntactic universal.

中文翻译：

---

作为语义语言普遍性的直接与间接因果关系：使用英语、希伯来语、印地语、日语和 K'iche' 玛雅语的计算模型预测巴厘岛语的语法判断

本研究的目的是检验语言普遍使用形态句法标记来区分更多和不那么直接因果关系的事件，更喜欢分别用不太明显和更明显的标记来标记它们（例如，有人打破了窗户与.有人打破了窗户； *有人哭了男孩vs有人让男孩哭了）。为此，我们调查了一个最近的计算模型，该模型学习预测说话者对英语、希伯来语、印地语、日语和 K'iche' Mayan 中的两个原因的动词相对偏好是否能够推广到第六种语言它从未受过训练：巴厘岛人。从 48 名以巴厘语为母语的成年人收集了 60 个动词的不太透明和更透明的因果形式的相对可接受性的判断。复合的跨语言计算模型能够预测这些判断，不仅是它见过的动词，而且——在分半验证测试中——它在任何语言中从未见过的动词。“随机语义”模型仅显示出相对较小的性能下降，可见动词的行为可以逐个动词地学习，但在推广到看不见的动词时，与人类判断的相关性为零。总之，这些发现表明，巴厘语以与这些不相关的语言类似的方式将因果关系的直接性概念化，因此支持了以下观点，即更多与不太明显的因果关系之间的区别构成了形态句法的普遍性。