Lexical and Syntactic Causatives in Oromo

Abstract

In the syntactic process of causative formation in Oromo, the affixation of the causative morpheme is sensitive to initial grammatical relations: the number of causative morphemes corresponds to the number of logical subjects in the clause. Thus, transitive and unergative verbs can be distinguished from unaccusatives in causative constructions. A causative-intensive construction may also be formed via reduplication of this causative morpheme. However, not all predicates that appear to be causatives can be intensified in this way. We propose that these predicates (a restricted number of unaccusative verb stems) combine derivationally with the causative morpheme, and that the output of this derivation may not be intensified. Oromo, then, shows the distinct effects of similar morphological processes arising either in the lexicon or in the syntax.