Content area
Abstract
This thesis is concerned with the syntax of productive morphological causatives in the Finno-Ugric language North Sámi, within the theoretical setting of the Chomskian Principles and Parameters/Minimalist framework. Providing rich and novel data, the thesis situates North Sámi in the general typology of causative constructions, demonstrating that causatives in this language invariably are of the so-called Faire Par-variety. The issues treated in this thesis are directly concerned with the anatomy of the verb phrase and the fine-grained details of its syntactic decomposition. Specifically, it is argued that the syntactic head that introduces the external argument and which provides the locus of agentivity must be distinct from the head hosting the Cause component of an agentive verb. It is shown that the Faire Par causative selects as its complement a truncated verbal projection corresponding to this Cause component. This captures a long-standing observation that the Base Verb in a Faire Par construction is restricted to a class that can descriptively be characterized as agentive. We thus take issue with other proposals that seek to constrain the formation of Faire Par causatives on other grounds. Furthermore, it is shown that the Base Object in a Faire Par causative is an argument of the causative formative, and not of the Base Verb. This conclusion is based on a number of selectional asymmetries that depend on whether the verb has undergone Faire Par-causativization or not.
