Estrutura argumental de sentenças causativas em Xirhonga

Abstract

Assuming that all languages have causative structures that are derived by different grammatical mechanisms, this dissertation aims to describe this type of construction in a Bantu language called Rhonga, spoken by about 226,000 people in Maputo, Mozambique. Causative structures are interpreted as having two events: a causing event and a caused event. From the data collected with two native informants, we identified three types of causative constructions in the language, namely: (i) lexical causatives; (ii) periphrastic causatives; and (iii) morphological causatives. Morphological causatives are formed by concatenating the morpheme {-is-} to the lexical root of the verb. This process is productive with unaccusative, unergative, and transitive verbs. We assume here, following a minimalist approach to Generative Syntax, that the morpheme in question sits at the head of the CauseP projection, which introduces causation reading into the sentence. We also seek to confirm if this head takes different types of complements, depending on the verb type. Based on the tests proposed by Pylkkänen (2008), we demonstrate that causatives from unaccusative verbs select as complement an acategorical Root √; causatives from unergative verbs select a VP without external argument, and causatives from transitive verbs select as complement a phasic v*P.