Abstract
This article considers the treatment of causatives in Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) in relation to questions regarding the division of labor between the Grammar and the Lexicon in Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). The focus is on causative constructions in which the causativizer affixes to the verb in so-called polysynthetic languages. In this respect the article also contributes to the treatment of polysynthesis in FDG. The central question is whether the causative construction is a derived lexeme created in the lexicon and inserted into the grammatical structure as a single lexical unit, or whether it is created in the grammar as a synthetic construction involving two lexical units. The article describes the pertinent morphosyntactic and semantic properties of causative constructions in Blackfoot, a polysynthetic language belonging to the Algonquian language family. I show that such constructions contain two events, each with their own semantic properties including argument structure and modifiability. In FDG this is accounted for by analyzing the semantic configuration at the Representational Level of analysis as a complex Episode consisting of two States-of-Affairs, while analyzing the morphosyntactic configuration at the Morphosyntactic Level as a complex verbal Word containing two verbal Roots, one of which is the causativizer. The causativizer is analyzed as an independent verbal lexeme stored in the lexicon rather than as derivational morpheme. This analysis follows logically from the way in which FDG conceptualizes polysynthesis, namely as a morphological type which allows the presence of more than one lexical element within a single word.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Lena Russell (LR) and Olive Davis (OD) for sharing their knowledge of the Blackfoot language with me, to Don Frantz for fielding questions about the interpretation of the data, and to Madoka Mizumoto for assistance with the fieldwork sessions. I am also grateful to Daniel García Velasco, Evelien Keizer, Kees Hengeveld, Hella Olbertz, Miriam Taverniers, and two anonymous reviewers for Linguistics for their thoughtful and detailed comments on earlier versions of this article, which have resulted in significant improvements. The usual disclaimers of course apply.
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