Detail #158: An Origin for a Causative Construction

Let's imagine a language that has developed out of a formerly inverse alignment language or an obviative-proximative language into something more "average". Now, we also know that "and" tends to have a temporal ordering effect when coordinating VPs, i.e. an utterance like "he stopped and got out of the car", we parse this as his stopping first and getting out of the car later, even for verb-pairs that aren't necessarily as clearly temporarily ordered. We also like to think there's a kind of causal link unless we have good extralinguistic knowledge to imply there shouldn't be one.

Anyways, now imagine that the direct marker or proximative marker is generalized and a case system starts distinguishing subjects and objects. However, the obviative congruence marker (or the inverse marker) survives in one context and one construction - originally, following a conjunction, it had a causative meaning, i.e.

Subject Verb₁-DIRECT Object-ACC and Verb₂-INVERSE

Subject Verb₁ed the Object and made it Verb₂

Over time, the requirement for a Verb₁ to be present weakened:

Subject and Verb₂-INVERSE Object

Subject made Object Verb₂

Of course, now 'INVERSE' (or obviative) no longer signifies INVERSE (or ...), but rather 'causative'.  

"And" as a grammaticalized thing is known from Hebrew, but there it has somewhat different use. This could of course be very fun if, in addition, and and with were conflated in the language. 

Detail #123: One idea for Alignment and Causatives

So, we know how coordination should  under syntactic ergativity:

girl_erg slapped boy_abs and fell

In syntactic ergativity, it is the boy that falls. In most ergative languages that also permit coordination, that is not the case, indicating they have a nominative-accusative syntax underlying the case marking. However, let's do some fun stuff with this and causatives.

We have two primary types of construction:

S O V 

S V 

Now, let's assume we're having a nom-acc language for now.
We get causative transformations thus:

C S O V

C O V

C S V

The C O V instance is obviously somewhat causative-passive, i.e. C causes someone to verb O. We would probably have marking along these lines:

C_nom S_{some case 1?} O_{some case 2?} V

C_nom  O_{some case 2?} V

C_nom  S_{some case 1?} V

It is possible S is marked as some kind of non-object,  and 1 and 2 might reasonably be the same. Let's now consider what happens when we have coordinate this with some other verb. Remember, non-causatives here coordinate like in English: S_nom O_acc V1 and V2 means Snom did V1 and V2, regardless of transitivity of V2.

 C_nom S_{some case 1?} felled and fell

 This could easily be a way of marking telicity of causatives! However, let's look at the other situation

 C_nom S_{case 1} O_{case 2} V_1,trans and V_2,intr

 John_nom made Eric_{case 1} paint the house_{case 2} and turned red : the house turned red (due to S1's painting it)

 C_nom O_{case 2} V_1,trans and V_2,intr

 C_nom made the house be painted and turned red: the house turned red (due to C's making people paint it)

We do get this kind of situation though: 

 C_nom S_{case 1} O_{1,case 2} V_1,trans and O_2,acc V_2,trans 

in pseudo-English with SVO order instead: 

 John_nom made Eric_{case 1} paint the house_{case 2} and spilled the paint_acc

This could reasonably go both ways:  John_nom or Eric_{case 1} could both be the subjects of V_2,trans from a purely a posteriori viewpoint. We could leave such a thing ambiguous, or we could restrict it to either of the two, or we could have some peculiar semantically empty 'pseudo-voice' that is used to resolve this, i.e. a 'decausative voice' that is used exclusively to coordinate your regular verbs with a causer, or maybe the other way around. We also have the situation where we may want to coordinate an intransitive verb with either the C or S argument. We could also have the case marking on S1 depend on whether we want it to be the subject of an embedded verb - maybe shifting it rightwards or marking it as nominative if we are going to coordinate with it?

Detail #1: a possessive and a causative structure

In some language,
"nom₁ has an adjective nom₂" turns out

[nom₁] [verbalized adjective] [nom_2, oblique object]

whereas "nom₁ makes nom₂ adjective" turns out as

[nom₁] [verbalized adjective] [nom_2, direct object]

The marking as direct object or oblique object may be obtained by some kind of adposition if the language is primarily isolating (in which case I'd suggest the oblique object be the only one marked at all), and in a more inflecting or agglutinating language, an accusative or somesuch would probably fit the bill fairly well.