Causality related to coreferential and reciprocal structures in Ewe

Abstract

This paper examines how causality is related to coreferential and reciprocal structures, looking at how they are conceived and expressed in Ewe. It deals with one particular type of causative constructions, namely the periphrastic causative construction, where the CAUSER is coreferential with the CAUSEE. This is the case where the CAUSER and the CAUSEE refer to one and the same person. For a more adequate description of this causative phenomenon in Ewe, two types of linguistic data are employed in this paper: textual and introspective. The textual data are composed of didactic materials which include popular story books and descriptions of folklore, customs and traditions, pseudo-literary plays and narratives published by the Bureau of Ghana Languages. All instances of the causative situation were extracted, with a careful consideration of the surrounding contexts so as to allow for a correct interpretation in the analyses (as context is often crucial for a correct semantic analysis and interpretation of causative forms). This paper identifies that just as English and other languages do, it is possible to express threefold coreferentiality in Ewe; where the causer is coreferential with the causee and the patient. It can also be identified that only verbs that can take the same semantic participant types as both subject and object can be reflexivized and reciprocalized; else, prototypical semantically-transitive verbs can be reflexivized only metaphorically.