Where Syntax and Semantics Meet: A Typological Investigation of Old Egyptian Causatives

Abstract

The earliest stage of the ancient Egyptian language attested in writing, i.e., Old Egyptian, had two productive causative mechanisms that increase the valency of verbs: morphological (mono-clausal) and periphrastic (bi-clausal). The former is characterized by the prefix s-, while the latter employs the lexical causative verb rḏj ‘give’ followed by a complement clause. Despite the fact that both causative strategies have been known to scholars since the inception of the study of the ancient Egyptian language, any systematic or comprehensive study of Egyptian causative verbs is lacking. This paper thus aims to provide a new insight into the Old Egyptian morphological and periphrastic causatives by examining their syntactic as well as semantic properties. The results of this analysis show which types of verbs have a preference for which of the two causative strategies and demonstrate the semantic differences between the morphological and periphrastic causative types. Furthermore, this paper clarifies the peculiar nature of the morphological causatives of transitive verbs, whose valency does not increase. I suggest a possible solution to this issue that lies in the function of the n-prefix in Old Egyptian.