[Lingtyp] A generalization about morphological and syntactic causatives (Sebastian Dom)

Wed Jun 7 21:24:11 UTC 2023

Dear Juergen,

Kagulu, a Bantu language spoken in central Tanzania, has a periphrastic causative construction with the auxiliary golos 'do, make'.

ka-m-golos-a                                ya-m-lim-il-e

sbj.3sg.1-obj.3sg.1-make-fv     sbj.3sg.1.sbjv-obj.3sg.1-cultivate-appl-sbjv

u-mu-gunda   u-akwe

ap3-3-farm     3-poss.3sg.1
‘S/he made him/her cultivate on his/her farm.’
(Petzell 2008: 147-148)

Like many Bantu languages, Kagulu also still has a verbal causative suffix -is/-es, e.g. on-es 'show' from on 'see'. However, this suffix is no longer productively used to derive causative verbs from non-causative ones. Although this does not contradict the tendency you describe from a synchronic perspective, I assume at some point in time the periphrastic and morphological causative coding strategies must have co-existed with varying degrees of productivity. That diachronic situation would be an exception to the tendency you describe. It also remains a question why a new periphrastic strategy to code causativity was developed when a morphological strategy was readily available.

Sebastian Dom

Petzell, Malin. 2008. The Kagulu language of Tanzania: Grammar, texts and vocabulary (East African Languages and Dialects 19). Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe.

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Verzonden: woensdag 7 juni 2023 22:23
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Onderwerp: Lingtyp Digest, Vol 105, Issue 6

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: A generalization about morphological and syntactic
      causatives (Jess Tauber)

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Message: 1
Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2023 16:23:23 -0400
From: Jess Tauber <tetrahedralpt at gmail.com>
To: Neil Myler <myler at bu.edu>
Cc: Juergen Bohnemeyer <jb77 at buffalo.edu>,
        "LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org"
        <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] A generalization about morphological and
        syntactic causatives
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        <CA+30tAQvELsmH7q19qNc3S3EQvgzS-wZ3dvbgAsJdyJByOZ75Q at mail.gmail.com>
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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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