Skou Grammar, Part 3 (Mark Donohue)

392 Skou 13 Valency changing processes As with many, but by no means all, languages, there are a variety of morphosyntactic means of indicating that a verb is being used with more, or less, than the number of arguments that it subcategorises for in its lexical entry. There are no morphological devices for lowering the number of core arguments of a verb (passives or antipassives, reflexives or reciprocals), as is common in languages of New Guinea, but there are a number of ways of accomplishing these goals with periphrastic contructions or multi-verb predicates. A putative passive uses a complex periphrastic construction with serial verbs; the reflexive construction maximally uses nòe ‘body’ as a marker of reflexivity, though the only indication that the valency is other than canonically bivalent is that possessive marking on a subject-possessed body (or body part) may be omitted. The reciprocal construction too appears to be a subset of a normal construction of nominal coordination, but there are some small morphosyntactic possibilities that allow us to think of this as representing a separate morphosyntactic category of its own. Periphrastic constructions are also used to indicate causation for most verbs, a valency- increasing device, but applicatives have their own dedicated suffix, and so are the only valency- changing process that involves bound morphology. Partly this is definitional: an applicative must involve morphology on the verb, otherwise it is termed a serial verb construction (which is also a possibility that is realised in Skou, and discussed more in 12.4). Nonetheless, the applicative is interesting for genuinely having bound morphological instantiation (reflecting a proto-Skou morpheme * , with approximately the same meaning: applicative/dative), where the other valency changing devices do not. These different constructions, while structurally quite diverse, are unified in the fact that they act as (clause-level) valency changing devices, and so are all treated together in this chapter. 13.1 Causatives There are no regular and completely productive morphological causative morphemes in Skou, a pattern that is typical of Papuan languages in general, where typically a range of semantically explicit resultative constructions are employed. The two most productive ways of forming monoclausal causatives are both analytical, using one of the verbs li ‘say, ‘do’ and leng “ ‘give’ ”, and having the base predicate appear following the verb, in the position used to encode obliques. Examples of each can be seen in (1) and (2), which show causative forms of base predicates which are monovalent and bivalent, respectively; (1)' and (2)' show the base predicate on which the causatives are built. Skou 393 (1) Pe nì=li pe=ti-ti. 3SG.F 1SG=do 3SG.F=3SG.F.go-3SG.F.go ‘I sent her.’ (that is, ‘I made her go.’) (1)' Pe pe=ti. 3SG.F 3SG.F=3SG.F.go ‘She went.’ (2) Pe (ya) nì nì=leng pe=p-ang. 3SG.F thing 1SG 1SG=give 3SG.F=3SG.F-eat ‘I fed her.’ (that is, ‘I made her eat.’) (2)' Pe ya pe=p-ang. 3SG.F thing 3SG.F=3SG.F-eat ‘She ate (something).’ We shall examine these two strategies, and other, more lexicalised, methods used to encode causation, in the following sections, starting with the most productive causatives formed with li ‘do’, and then looking at other analytical causatives formed with leng “give”. Following this a short account of some of the lexicalised causative pairings will be discussed. 13.1.1 Biclausal causativisation with li ‘do’ In the absence of such a lexically suppletive form that marks the bivalent causation of a monovalent state, causation is most commonly expressed biclausally, with the general verb li ‘do’ as the causative verb. Other. The following example shown that the simple stative predicate fu ‘be afraid’ can be used either monovalently or bivalently, with the subject of the verb being in both cases the experiencer of the state. Monovalent predicate, only experiencer S (3) Nì=fu i li. 1SG=afraid be do ‘I’m afraid.’ Bivalent predicate, experiencer A and effector P: (4) Nì móenòeng nì=fu i li. 1SG crocodile 1SG=afraid be do ‘I’m afraid of crocodiles.’ An alternative, causative reading, ‘scare’ rather than ‘fear’, in which the experiencer is the sentence’s notional object, and the effector of the fear is the subject, can be expressed with the addition of the causative li ‘do’, and a marker of switch reference (see 19.xx). This is shown in (5), with (6) added to show the different domains of agreement. Note that with the feminine noun móenòeng ‘crocodile’ as subject the verb must display the feminine form of li, tue. Clearly the li in (4) cannot be agreeing with the crocodile, but can only represent aspectual marking for the predicate fu ‘afraid’. 394 Skou Causative, A added (5) Móenòeng pe=tue=ko nì=fu i li. crocodile 3SG.F=3SG.F.do=OBV 1SG=afraid be do ‘The crocodile scared me.’ (6) Nì=li=ko ku ke=fu i li. 1SG=do=OBV child 3SG.NF=afraid be do ‘I scared the child.’ We can model the different argument patterns seen in the sentences above with the diagram in table xx158. Here a line connecting an argument and a verb indicates that it is that argument which is the morphological subject of that verb. Table 158. Correlations between monovalent, bivalent, and causative codings with li ‘do’ Intransitive (3)' ExperiencerSUBJ Verbfu Transitive (4)' ExperiencerSUBJ EffectorOBJ Verbfu Causative (5)', (6)' EffectorSUBJ Verbli ExperiencerSUBJ Verbfu Of these, only (5) and (6) represent instances of causativisation. Here the structure is that shown in (7), not (8). Causative organisation (7) li ‘áSUBJ, PRED áSUBJñ ñ’ (8) * li ‘áSUBJ, OBJ PRED áSUBJñ ñ’ Note that there is no object for the main clause. That is, we cannot talk of nì ‘me’ in (5) being the object of the sentence, despite the English translation. A more grammatical-functions faithful translation might be ‘The crocodile arranged matters so that I was afraid.’, except that in Skou ‘matters’ is pleonastic. Evidence that there is no object for li comes from attempts to put pronominal objects in the object position in the matrix clause, as in the ungrammatical (8). SUBJ OBJ V (9) * móenòeng nì pe=tue=ko nì=fu i li crocodile 1SG 3SG.F=3SG.F.do=OBV 1SG=afraid be do ‘The crocodile scared me.’ xxxxxxxxxxxx It is not true that all instances of verbs or predicates that employ li ‘do’ added are causative verbs. As will be discussed in more detail in chapter 14, there are plenty of nominal + verb predicates using the generic verb li ‘do’ as their inflecting component. While a full discussion of these N+V predicates will be deferred until the next chapter, we can mention the following different uses of li ‘do’ in predication, either as part of a simple predicate, or to add either a P or an A to an otherwise monovalent predicate. Skou 395 Table 159. Lexical valency increase strategies INTR (+A) (+P) re ‘go’ go do go ráue há ‘laugh’ laughter do laughter hit fu ‘afraid’ afraidADJ do afraidV afraidV The relevance of these N+V predicates in a discussion of causation is that there is one class of verbs which show an absolute restriction from appearing in a causative construction formed with li ‘do’, and are presented in clearly biclausal sentences with switch reference between the cause and the effect, such as the following. (10) Ang ne=ti-ti=ko móe bìng. fish.poison 1PL=1PL.do-RED=OBV fish PL.die ‘We wring out the fish-poison roots, and the fish die.’ Here the complex predicate ang li ‘do fish poison = poison fish’ cannot be causativised with a li causative, since this lexical verb is already present in the simple non-causative predicate, and there is a constraint (an operation of the obligatory contour principle, forbidding adjacent like entities) that prevents identical verbs following each other. This means that (11) is ungrammatical. (11) * ang ne=ti-ti(=ko) ke=li=ko móe bìng fish.poison 1PL=1PL.do-RED=OBV 3SG.NF=do=OBV fish PL.die ‘He made us wring out the fish-poison roots to kill the fish.’ ‘He made us wring out the fish-poison roots killing the fish.’ In order to causativise the clause in (10), we must use a separate clausal construction with a more semantically explicit verb, as in (12). In this sentence the verb lóeng ‘say, tell’ is a separate clause that is linked by switch reference morphology to the base predicate. (12) Ne te=r-íng=ko ang ne=ti-ti 1PL 3PL=3PL-say.PL=OBV fish.poison 1PL=1PL.do-RED (=ko móe bìng). =OBV fish PL.die ‘They told us to wring out the fish-poison roots (to kill the fish).’ Generally the li causative strategy cannot be used with lexically bivalent predicates. A construction such as (13) is thus ungrammatical, as mentioned above, and so are (14) and (15). Replacing te ti ko with te ríng ko (as in (12)) in these examples would make grammatical sentences. (13) * ne te=ti=ko ang ne=ti-ti 1PL 3PL=3PL.do=OBV fish.poison 1PL=1PL.do-RED ‘They told us to wring out the fish-poison roots.’ (14) * ne te=ti=ko ang ne=yú-yú 1PL 3PL=3PL.do=OBV fish.poison 1PL=search.for-RED ‘They told us to look for the fish-poison roots.’ (15) * ne te=ti=ko naké ne=jí-jí 1PL 3PL=3PL.do=OBV dog 1PL=PL.hit-RED ‘They told us to hit the dogs.’ 396 Skou Another example of the ungrammaticality of li as a causative with a bivalent predicate can be seen in the strongly rejected (16), in which the base predicate uses the verb li as well.

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