Causatives in Classical Armenian

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents the results of a study of the five causative formations of Classical Armenian. It focuses on the correspondence between the morphosyntactic complexity of causatives and the autonomy of the causee, which is specified based on the semantic type of the noncausal base verb. The correspondence proves to be incomplete as witnessed by areas of overlap in the lexical distribution of base verbs. While the competing lexical and synthetic causatives reflect the patientive and non-patientive readings of the first argument of the noncausal verb, respectively, the competing synthetic and analytic causatives rather express the contrast in the degree of affectedness of the causee, which does not fully depend on the semantic properties of the noncausal predicate. The semantic types of causation better correlate with morphosyntactic complexity than with segmental length in Classical Armenian.