The Kihema causative construction within Baker’s theory of incorporation

Abstract

Baker (1988) states that the causative verb is a morpheme that needs to be attached to a host. A base verb must move cyclically and fuses with the causative verb in a higher clause. By the projection principle, this movement should not destroy thematically relevant structures; hence, the moved verb root must leave a trace to allow theta role assignment to the stranded subject and to head the embedded clausal complement, which the causative morpheme lexically selects. This causative construction has an impact on the argument structure of the verb turning an intransitive verb into a transitive verb and a transitive verb into a ditransitive verb. The aim of this article is to examine whether or not Baker’s claims can be applied to Kihema, a Bantu language spoken in the north-eastern province of Ituri in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this article, I provide empirical evidence that according to Baker’s incorporation theory, the Kihema morphological causative construction is the result of a syntactic process in which the base verb (= V₂) undergoes head movement to combine with the causative affix (= V₁) in the structure.

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2009, 27(1): 25–37