{thanks to the sci.lang participants who responded to my query} From: Julia A M Simon Newsgroups: sci.lang Subject: Re: examples of causatives Date: 7 Jul 1998 08:38:30 GMT Hello! Rick Harrison wrote: :> I have heard that some languages create causative verbs by means :> of affixes, e.g. converting "see" to "show (cause to see)" or :> "eat" to "feed (cause to eat)". If someone could post a few :> examples of how this works in natural languages I would appreciate it. Some examples from Finnish: oppia "to learn" -> opettaa "to teach" istua "to sit" -> istuttaa "to plant; to seat (guests at a table, etc.)" pudota "to fall" -> pudottaa "to drop" syodä "to eat" -> syottää "to feed" juoda "to drink" -> juottaa "to give so. sth. to drink" (is there an English verb for that?) lukea "to read" -> luettaa "to make read" kuulua "to hear" -> kuuluttaa "to announce, give notice" ihastua "to be pleased -> ihastuttaa "to charm, enrapture" with sth." soida "to sound" -> soittaa "to play (an instrument), ring (a bell); to call (on the phone)" näkyä "to be visible" -> näyttää "to show; to perform" olla "to be" -> olettaa "to assume, suppose" mennä "to go; to leave" -> menettää "to lose" etc. etc. Generally speaking, a non-causative verb is transformed into a causative verb by changing the normal infinitive suffix -A/-dA/-tA to the causative -ttAA (which, technically, is probably a causative -ttA- followed by the infinitive -A). I'm not sure if this works with any Finnish verb or just a certain group, though; anyway, this group must be fairly large, since I've had no trouble finding examples. (Finnish has vowel harmony, but instead of typing all the variants I use "A" as shorthand for "a (back) or Š (front)".) Sometimes the causative suffix triggers certain changes in the verb stem (such as "luke-" > "lue-", "oppe-" > "ope-"); basically certain consonants in certain positions alternate with certain other consonants depending on whether or not the syllable that starts with them is open. If you want to learn more about this, look up "consonant gradation" in a Finnish grammar book. There are also verbs that look like causatives, and have a kind of causative meaning, but don't seem to have any non-causative partner; e.g. ilmoittaa "to inform" or oikeuttaa "to entitle". BTW, there used to be a similar suffix (-j-, if I remember correctly) in the Germanic languages (giving us verb pairs like "to fall" : "to fell"; German "fallen" : "fällen"; Swedish "falla" : "fälla"). CU, Julia 8-) (not a native speaker of Finnish, but never giving up) -- Julia Simon Hypp"a"aj"at"ar Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst email: simon@cc.helsinki.fi, sileas@coli.uni-sb.de snailmail: Akanapolku 2 L 401, 01370 Vantaa, Finland homepage: http://www.lingsoft.fi/~simon Where linguists gather, madness abounds ( - the story of my life) ____________________________________________________________________________ From: Helmut.Richter@lrz-muenchen.de (Helmut Richter) Newsgroups: sci.lang Subject: Re: examples of causatives Date: 7 Jul 1998 09:36:29 GMT Example 1: Hebrew (and probably all other Semitic languages) Each verb is built from a three-consonant root by one of seven methods to construct a verb stem from the root. Such a method is called a "binyan" (building, construction). One of the binyanim is explicitly causative (cause to ...), another one has often an implicitly causative meaning (act so that ...). Example: Root 'BD 'abad = perish, get lost he'ebid = cause to perish, destroy 'ibed = lose As one can see, the different binyanim are differentiated both by affixes (the initial h-) and by exchanging the vowels between the consonants of the root. see - show, come - bring are more pairs that work according to the explicitly causative binyan (the one with the initial h- and the i as last vowel). Example 2: German (and any other Germanic language?) For many verbs, a causative verb can be constructed by replacing the main vowel (mostly an "i") by "e". Where this works, the past tense changes vowels for the non-causative verb (sinken, sank, gesunken) but does not for the causative verb (senken, senkte, gesenkt). Examples: sinken - senken, trinken - traenken, liegen - legen, sitzen - setzen, verschwinden - verschwenden, schwimmen - schwemmen, haengen - haengen where the last pair has the difference only in the past tense (haengen, hing, gehangen vs. haengen, haengte, gehaengt). A somewhat irregular pair is biegen - beugen. (The way German verbs are constructed has more similarities to binyanim which - according to widespread usage in this group - should trigger a theory that these two languages are closely related. I leave it to others to suggest such a theory.) Helmut Richter ____________________________________________________________________________ From: markrose@xochi.tezcat.com (Mark Rosenfelder) Newsgroups: sci.lang Subject: Re: examples of causatives Date: 7 Jul 1998 10:01:46 -0500 Hi, Rick! Here's some examples from Quechua: miy 'eat' (archaic) --> michiy 'feed animals' yachay 'know' --> yachachiy 'teach' nanay 'be in pain' --> nanachiy 'hurt' manchay 'fear' --> manchachi 'ghost' (i.e. 'scarer') qaway 'see' --> qawachiy 'show, demonstrate' wan~uy 'die' --> wan~uchiy 'kill' rikchay 'wake (intr)' --> rikchachiy 'waken (tr)' win~ay 'grow (intr)' --> win~achiy 'grow (tr)' I've purposely chosen examples where English would use a different word, but it can be applied to any verb, or to adjectives: chaki 'dry (adj)' --> chakichiy 'dry (v)' pin~a 'angry' --> pin~achiy 'annoy' ____________________________________________________________________________ From: Pete Carlton Newsgroups: sci.lang Subject: Re: examples of causatives Date: Tue, 07 Jul 1998 12:06:09 -0700 Japanese has them too, and it's very productive (the "(s)aseru" suffix): iku - ikaseru (to go; to cause sth. to go) taberu - tabesaseru (to eat ; to cause sth. to eat) and some have different nuances; another verb "to eat", kuu, has the form "kuwaseru" which means more "to feed" e.g. a pet than "to cause to eat". Some causative forms have simplified to become simple active verbs: "miru" to see, but "miseru" to show (I don't know if "misaseru" exists, but if it did it would just mean "cause to see"). and the -seru part is just -su in some dialects. Pete UCBerkeley MCB dept.