Only One (s)ase: Looking at Japanese Causatives from a French Perspective
Vincent Homer, Tomoko Ishizuka
July 2009 

In this paper, we offer evidence that the universally accepted view that Japanese has two homophonous causative morphemes (s)ase, which differ in their interpretation (‘let’ vs. ‘make’) and in the Case pattern they induce (Dative Causee with ‘let’ (s)ase, vs. Accusative Causee with ‘make’ (s)ase) is inadequate. We observe that the assignment of the Dative to the Causee is only possible with verbal stems which assign Accusative to their internal arguments, and that all Dative Causees are subject to an animacy restriction. Japanese shares these two features with French, which has only one causative morpheme faire: we therefore propose a unified analysis of Dativization, which dispenses with the traditional dualistic approach to Japanese Causatives.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/000952 (please use that when you cite this article, unless you want to cite the full url: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000952)
Published in:	To appear in Proceedings of CLS 45
keywords:	causatives, japanese, romance, animacy, applicative, syntax
Downloaded:	112 times

 

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