[Lingtyp] A generalization about morphological and syntactic causatives

[Juergen Bohnemeyer]

Dear all – It seems that languages with fully productive morphological causatives tend to lack syntactic (a.k.a. periphrastic/analytical) causatives. By ‘fully productive’, I mean crucially that the causative marker can be applied to already transitive (and thus semantically causative) bases, and therefore can be used to express indirect causation. Examples of languages that have fully productive morphological causatives in this sense and lack periphrastic causative constructions include Chuvash, Japanese, Hindi/Urdu, and Shawi (Cahuapanan, Peru).

Two questions about the above generalization:


(i)                  Are there counterexamples?

(ii)                Are there statements of this generalization in the literature?

Thanks! – Juergen

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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