Morphosyntax of causatives and applicatives in Tshiluba

Abstract


 
 
 This work explores the argument structure of causatives and applicatives in Tshiluba, a Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The data were elicited with a speaker of Tshiluba through storyboard elicitation and grammaticality judgement tasks. Consistent with preceding analyses of benefactives in Bantu languages (Pylkkänen 2002; McGinnis 2008; de Kind and Bostoen 2012, inter al.), this work supports the analysis that benefactives in Tshiluba are high applicatives. Cases where both causative and applicative morphemes are present provide evidence that the position of the applicative morpheme determines whether the construction is benefactive or malefactive. Within the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz; 1993, 1994), the applicative morpheme -el occurs as the head of a high ApplP, occasionally above vCAUSE and crucially always above Voice. This work shows that this is the case for both passives and antipassives of benefactives. Malefactives appear to be lower, as -el crucially occurs below vCAUSE and Voice in all cases. An unexpected pattern arises – Tshiluba double-object applicatives have been previously analysed as asymmetric in the positions available to each argument, in that the recipient indirect objects must follow the verb and precede the direct object (as in English, Bo grew Jo fruit vs. #Bo grew fruit Jo) (Dom et al. 2015). In the present data, direct objects and indirect objects can alternate in position.