When Is a Causative Situation not Mapped to a Causative Construction Proper? The Case of Hupa

Abstract

This work interrogates why certain real-world events that meet criteria for being considered causative events cannot be expressed using Hupa’s morphological or syntactic causative constructions, but must be encoded using one of two periphrastic constructions in which the Causer or cause is not marked as an argument. Based on fieldwork with a native speaker, I probe into these two periphrastic constructions in depth, accounting for their distributions through an appeal to Næss’s (2007) account of semantic transitivity.