Morphological causatives in Mapudungun

LUCÍA GOLLUSCIO

Nijmegen

Conferencia; Conferencia en el Depto. De Lingüística del Instituto Max Planck; 2005

Instituto Max Planck for Evolutionary Anthropology

In this paper, I focus on morphological causatives of intransitive verbs in Mapudungun, also known as Mapuche or Araucanian, an indigenous language in southern Chile and Argentina. I emphasize the role of animacy and control rather than agency in this language and take lexical aspect into account. I argue that the behavior of intransitives with two distinct causative morphemes reveals a split system: one verb class, “inactive” intransitive verbs, which can be characterized as having members that are specialized, non-productive, and “uncontrolled”; and, a second larger class, “active” intransitives, consisting of animate verbs that take arguments with different degrees of control and agentivity. Thus, the contrast between “inactive” and “active” intransitive verbs is overtly marked in Mapudungun by the causatives rather than by the pronominal inflection. In this respect, this paper aims to link studies on split intransitivity with those on causativization in the languages of South America.