Combinatory conditions on Halkomelem causatives
Donna B. Gerdts · Linguistics · 2004
Previous treatments of Halkomelem causatives have posited various conditions on their formation, including restricting causatives to intransitive bases and banning double causatives. While these conditions account for the basic facts, more elaborate data involving lexical suffixes and reflexive causatives show that they can in fact be violated. This observation leads to an alternative view of conditions on causatives. I propose a valence-counting system that requires the output of a string of derivational rules to total a valence number that allows the noun phrases to correctly map to the inflectional system of the language. An important aspect of this analysis is that intermediate valence totals are not monitored. For example, adding a causative to a transitive, which would violate an intransitive base condition, does not automatically result in an ungrammatical form. Rather, later valence-decreasing morphology can save the form. This simple valence-totaling system accounts for basic as well as complex causatives.