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Abstract:
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No detailed discussion of the various types of formal expressions of causal relations in Hupa (California Athabaskan) has yet been undertaken. Golla’s (1970) descriptive grammar provides an explanation of how the basic causative morphology operates, which is recapitulated in Golla & O’Neill (2001). Some type of causative notion is claimed to be basic to some themes, but how this is instantiated within the larger verb word is not explored. Rice’s (2000) survey of voice and valency marking in the greater Athabaskan family provides an excellent general overview of several phenomena, including the encoding of causativity, but a detailed discussion of periphrastic and other syntactic causative constructions—let alone specifics on the Hupa construction(s)—would have been beyond the scope of that survey, and at any rate was not undertaken. This paper puts forth a systematic account of the Hupa syntactic causative construction, with a focus on distribution (i.e., compatibility with different classes of lexical verbs) and semantics. In addition to this full descriptive account, I argue, following Rice (2000) and drawing on Dixon’s (2000) account on the semantic typology of causative constructions, that causee control over the effecting of the caused microevent is a major semantic factor in licensing the Hupa syntactic causative construction. |
