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Lexical and Syntactic Causatives in Oromo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Stanley Dubinsky,
Maria-Rosa Lloret and
Paul Newman
Stanley Dubinsky*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
Maria-Rosa Lloret*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
Paul Newman*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
*
Board of Studies in Linguistics, Cowell College, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Department of Linguistics, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405
Department of Linguistics, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405
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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.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 64 , Issue 3 , September 1988, pp. 485 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 18th Conference on African Linguistics in Montreal in April, 1987. We would like to thank Addisu Tolesa for his invaluable help and coöperation in the compilation and interpretation of the Oromo examples which were elicited between 1985 and 1988 at Indiana University. We would further like to express our gratitude to the following individuals for their valuable comments and suggestions: Robert Botne, William Bright, Greville Corbett, William Davies, Geoffrey Pullum, and Laurie Tuller. We also acknowledge the constructive criticisms provided by the anonymous reviewers for Language. All errors and omissions are the responsibility of the authors.

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