Causative morphemes as a de-transitivizing device: what do non-canonical instances reveal about causation and causativization?
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Seppo Kittilä
Causativization is typically understood as a process that increases the valency of verbs via agent introduction. In addition, causatives have other functions, such as agentivization. Here, we examine even less orthodox functions of causative morphemes: cases in which causativization decreases the degree of transitivity associated with the denoted event - that is, the expressed function is the exact opposite of the canonical function. The expression of this function by causative morphemes becomes understandable if we consider the differences between agent-related and causer-related causation. In agent-related causation, the original clause involves no agent and agent introduction is thus complete (as in ‘the child broke the vase’). In the causer-related causation, agent introduction is less complete since the original event already involves an agent (‘I made him build a house’). The occurrence of transitivity-decreasing causatives is explained by referring to features of causerrelated causation. Moreover, the article proposes a grammaticalization path for de-transitivizing causatives based on instances of causer-related causation.
© 2013 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- A questionnaire study of two-verb clusters in West Central German
- Completives as markers of non-volitionality
- How common is r-Epenthesis?
- On the many faces of incompleteness: Hide-and-seek with the Finnish partitive object
- Causative morphemes as a de-transitivizing device: what do non-canonical instances reveal about causation and causativization?
- There are existential constructions and existential constructions: Presumption-invoking existentials in English
- When the indefinite article implies uniqueness: A case study from Old Italian
- Idiomatic proclivity and literality of meaning in body-part nouns: Corpus studies of English, German, Swedish, Russian and Finnish
- The expression of first-person-singular subjects in spoken Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese: Semantic roles and formulaic sequences
- BOOK REVIEWS
- MISCELLANEA: Report on the 45th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (Stockholm, Sweden, 29 August–1 September 2012)
