Unaccusativity and the syntax of imperatives in East Circassian
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v2i0.4091Keywords:
unaccusativity, imperative mood, causative, East Circassian, Kabardian, Northwest CaucasianAbstract
This paper presents novel evidence for the syntactic distinction between unergative and unaccusative verbs in East Circassian (or Kabardian. The evidence concerns a particular strategy of forming imperatives -- simultaneous causativization and reflexivization -- which is only applicable to unaccusative predicates. I argue that this type of imperative involves the promotion of the internal argument to the a higher position through the use of the causative morpheme which has been grammaticalized to mark imperative mood. The observed patterns suggest that imperative mood, while generally associated with the CP-layer, must be sensitive to the structure of vP.
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Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.