[Lingtyp] A generalization about morphological and syntactic causatives

[Jess Tauber]

I've worked on the recently extinct genetic isolate Yahgan from Tierra del
Fuego for the past quarter of a century. It had a simple causative tu:-
(colon marks the tenseness of the vowel preceding it) and a
permissive-causative u:-, and other voice prefixes containing both. It also
had two lexemes used in periphrastic causatives wvshta:gu: (v schwa, sh
shibilant voiceless fricative) 'work,do, make, manufacture, create, labor,
complete, accomplish, act' and  a:kina 'do, make, work, capture, catch, get
back, retake'. The difference between them is that wvshta:gu: appears to be
used where something NEW is made or done versus a:kina, where the former
state is restored (so anti-entropic?). Based on the fact that most of the
grammatical affixes still have full lexical antecedents I'd speculate that
split between the morphological and lexical/periphrastic causatives was
still in play when the language became moribund decades ago. So maybe a
language has to 'choose' at some point, and Yahgan hadn't done so yet when
it became extinct?

Jess Tauber

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On Wed, Jun 7, 2023 at 3:57 PM Neil Myler <myler at bu.edu> wrote:

> Dear Juergen,
> isiXhosa (Nguni, Bantu) is a counter-example.  These examples come from a
> joint paper by me and Zoliswa Mali that came out in* Syntax* a couple of
> years ago (the bolding highlights an alternation in the marking of the
> causee that plays an important role in the paper; numerals in the glosses
> are for noun classes):
>
> [image: Screenshot 2023-06-07 at 3.53.39 PM.png]
> [image: Screenshot 2023-06-07 at 3.54.04 PM.png]
>
> Best,
> Neil
>
> On Wed, Jun 7, 2023 at 2:57 PM Juergen Bohnemeyer <jb77 at buffalo.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
>> Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
>> Phone: (716) 645 0127
>> Fax: (716) 645 3825
>> Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu
>> Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/
>>
>> Office hours Tu/Th 3:30-4:30pm in 642 Baldy or via Zoom (Meeting ID 585
>> 520 2411; Passcode Hoorheh)
>>
>> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
>> (Leonard Cohen)
>>
>> --
>>
>>
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