Browsing by Subject "grammatical voice"

In earlier research, the sociative causative has been considered a subcategory of a prototypical causative and not a category of its own. In the sociative causative the causer both initiates the event and participates in it, unlike in the prototypical causative in which the causer is only the initiator. It has been proposed that the causer can participate in the event either by acting together with the causee, helping the causee, or supervising the causee. The sociative causative can be marked on the predicate by using a specific sociative causative marker or it can be a reading of a prototypical causative construction or a reading of an applicative. The objective of the thesis is twofold. First, the intention is to find out, using a typological sampling method, if there are more languages with a specific sociative causative construction beyond those that are currently known and, second, how these constructions behave. Special attention is paid to the exact semantics of the sociative causation to see if it reflects the semantics proposed in the earlier literature. The contexts in which the prototypical causatives and applicatives can get the sociative reading are also studied. The intention is to find out where the sociative causative aligns in the causative continuum. It has been proposed in the previous literature that the sociative causative is an areal feature of the South American indigenous languages, and 26 languages were previously known to have sociative causative. In addition to these 26 languages, a genealogically balanced sampling method was applied and four languages with sociative causative function were found. Since South America is one of the world’s most linguistically diverse areas the data gathering was limited to the western part of the continent. The 30 languages were analyzed formally and semantically. The analysis shows that the sociative causative usually describes the type of causation in which the causer is a co-actor with the causee or the causer helps the causee. The supervision type of sociative causation, however, occurred rarely. The sociative causative tends to be used with intransitive verbs that express motion or physical activity. In the causative continuum it seems to be in the middle, as the previous research proposes.