Omnipresent little v in Pazar Laz

This study argues that in Pazar Laz, an endangered South-Caucasian language spoken in Turkey, all eventive verbal predicates, including both unergatives and unaccusatives, pattern as transitives syntactically, involving a subject and an object position. Thus, there are no syntactic differences between transitives, unergatives, and unaccusatives. The chapter argues that this pattern correlates with the voice system in the language. While it lacks the voice phenomena associated with passives, middles, and anticausatives, Pazar Laz exhibits a three-way voice system involving Initiator (Actor) Voice, Undergoer (Object) Voice, and Active Impersonal Voice, which yield transitive constructions retaining both the subject and the object positions in syntax. The voice system is shown to be in line with Pazar Laz being a very conservative example of Initiation-language à la Ritter & Rosen (2000), who present a typology of languages, depending on whether the language defines an event based on its initial bound or its terminal bound.