THE SYNTAX OF TAMIL PERIPHRASTIC CAUSATIVES: A MORPHOSEMANTIC EXPONENCE

Abstract

Through argumentation from diverse syntactic patterns that shed light on argument-structure such as scrambling, reflexive binding, conjunction reduction and passivisation, this thesis carefully distinguishes what have previously been conflated as a single causative construction; the vaikafactitive and vidu-permissive Tamil periphrastic causatives. The former is a monoclausal complex predicate causative construction while the latter falls within a biclausal complementation causative construction. Following a research paradigm where periphrastic realisations of morphosyntactic inflections and valency-changing alternations differ from synthetic realisations merely in terms of surface encoding strategies and not argument structure (Lee & Ackerman 2017, Ackerman & Webelhuth 1998, Bonami 2015), Tamil periphrastic causatives are likewise modelled as an exponence of morphosemantic valency-changing alternations . This thesis hence extends Bonami’s (2015) THEORY OF PERIPHRASIS by developing an empiricallydriven formal lexical analysis of the periphrastic exponence of morphosemantic alternations within a constraint-based Head-Driven-Phrase-Structure-Grammar (HPSG) architecture.