Duah, R.A.Saah, K.K.2019-12-232019-12-232017-03-30http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh/handle/123456789/34303SeminarThis paper presents the morphology and syntax of causative expressions in Kwa languages. Data for the study come from fieldwork and other secondary sources. In the languages surveyed, causative expressions show varying degrees of morphosyntactic complexity. The study identified lexical causatives which involve the expression of causing and caused events in a single predicate. In this type of causative, Kwa languages display several verbal alternations such as causative/inchoative alternating verbs, suppletive pairs, eg. wu/ku(m) ‘to die/to kill’ (Akan), srɔ/fia ‘to know/to teach’ (Ewe); equipollent pairs. Data from Kwa languages challenge the traditional assumption that causative/inchoative alternation corresponds to the transitive and intransitive use of the same verb (Haspelmath 1993; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995). For example, in Nzema, some predicates which alternate between causative/inchoative meanings are transitive in their inchoative use. Thus, it is argued that the assumption that causative/inchoative verbs lack “agent-oriented meaning” (Haspelmath 1993) or “undergo a process of detransitivization” (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995) is not a prerequisite for expressing causative meaning (see Kittilä 2009). Kwa is morphologically impoverished and does not seem to display any productive morphological causativization unlike its ancestral Bantu relatives. In all the data, only Nzema and Avatime show some form of morphological causativization (Ford 1970; Chinebuah 1972). It is suggested, however, that these causative suffixes should not be analyzed as morphological causatives as such but that together with their verb stems they form a lexical causative (see Simango 2010 for similar arguments on ciChewa; Rude 1983). In all the Kwa languages sampled, there is an analytic/syntactic causative construction which involves a functional causative predicate which takes a clause as a complement. In most cases, the causative predicate is related to the lexical verb ‘give’ or ‘do’. In its causative function, give is neutral with regards to the type of instigation involved in the causing event but expresses the abstract notion of causation. Although the analytic causative in Kwa languages are underlyingly biclausal, the preferred construction in most of the languages is to have the construction without an overt complementizer, even though biclausal sentences in Kwa normally require an overt complementizer (Saah 1994). It is suggested that one reason for the general optionality of the complementizer is due to the type of complementation involved. The hypothesis is that the complementizer in the analytic causative construction may be semantically vacuous and is not needed to link the causing and caused events semantically. The general optionality of the complementizer in the analytic causative construction, however, has consequences for the grammatical relations and syntactic properties of the causative sentence in general.enmorphologycausative expressionsKwa languagesmorphosyntactic complexityArticle