Causative Constructions: A Descriptive Analysis

Abstract

This study is a descriptive study of causative constructions in Bassa language. It is a language classified as belonging to the Western Kru of Benue Congo (Blench, & Williamson, 2000:25; Crozier and Blench, 1992:32). Causative construction implies an expression where the caused event is depicted as taking place because someone does something or something happens, that is, if x hadn’t happened, y wouldn’t have happened. The process is characterized by two events such that one occurs at t1 and another at t2, and the occurrence of the first is responsible for the second event. Data for the study were sourced by a customized checklist, my native intuition as native speaker, and some written texts in Bassa. The work discovered that morphologically derived causative verbs could come from a verb or an adjective stem and in each case; it is characterized by transitivizing the derived verb with the resultant effect of increasing the argument by one to the basic structure and transformation of the arguments. In this case, the basic subject moves to the object position and the applied argument, that is, the causer argument becomes the subject of the derived mono-clausal structure. This work also discovered that when these processes occur, the applied subject is focalized, becomes the privileged argument and displaces the inherent subject and moves it below the predicate and the derived mono-clausal sentence from the complex sentence is economized.

UJAH: Unizik Journal of Arts and Humanities vol 14 (2) 2013