An Event-Based Account of - <i>Kan</i> Constructions in Standard Indonesian

Abstract

A widely held position in the literature on verbal meaning is that the lexical-semantic representation of verbs involves complex event structures with semantic primitives like CAUSE and BECOME (e.g. Dowty 1979). A growing number of recent works on predicate decomposition have shown that there is a close correlation between the semantics of event structure and the syntax (e.g. Hale &amp; Keyser 1993, Harley 1995, Travis 2000, van Hout 2000, Ramchand 2003, 2007). This article presents an additional empirical argument for the view that there is a direct mapping between semantic decomposition of predicates and the (morpho)syntax by developing an explicit analysis of the semantics and syntax of the verbal suffix - kan in Standard Indonesian. We argue that - kan is a morphological reflex of the RESULT head, the semantics of which gives rise to a causative interpretation. By treating - kan as being sensitive to a syntactic configuration involving a result state, the current analysis not only provides important empirical support for the event decomposition of predicates in the syntax but also leads to a unified semantic and syntactic account of - kan , which captures straightforwardly distributional properties of the suffix.