Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
Causative constructions in Ainu: A typological perspective with remarks on the diachrony (Bugaeva)
This week's paper was submitted by u/Lysimachiakis and talks about causative constructions in the language isolate Ainu, spoken on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Causatives are a valency-modifying operation in which a verb's argument structure is augmented by introducing a new argument, the 'causer'. A simple clause like 'The man eats fish', in which 'the man' represents the A and 'fish' represents the O, can be causativized as follows: the new argument, viz. the causer, (e.g. 'I') is introduced to the clause, while the original A/O are demoted. The result is 'I made the man eat fish'. Note that there might be some differences on the formation of causatives in distinct languages; take a look at the paper to see how the Ainu language handles it! Now onto this week's prompts:
- How do causative constructions work in your language?
- Are periphrastic and morphological causatives distinct in your language?
- Are there differences between causatives derived from intransitives and transitives?
- What are other noteworthy valency-modifying operations in your language?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!