Sociative Causation in the Buryat Language

The paper deals with semantics and functioning of the sociative causative in the Buryat language. Sociative causation implies a combination of the causing and caused situations in space and time, the caused object being endowed with will and able to control the process. Goals. The study primarily seeks to identify functioning features of the Buryat sociative causative, since the aspect has not been duly examined yet. Materials and Methods. The work analyzes fiction texts included in the online Buryat Corpus, employs the methods of contextual and distributive analysis. Results. The paper notes that the sociative causative changes the event and role structures of the causative construction. According to the continual scale of semantic types of causation, three meanings of sociative causation can be distinguished in the Buryat language, namely: ‘joint action’, ‘assistive’ and ‘supervision’. The study shows that the role structure of joint actions is characterized by that both the causator and object of causation perform same or similar actions, in assistive patterns an assistant replaces the causator and the latter here takes on the role of complement, supervision also implies that the causator turns into an observer. It is concluded that sociativeness in the Buryat language is associated with semantics of active and passive voices. Special attention is paid to constructions with different semantics of the sociative causative. The work reveals the meaning of joint action is most frequently expressed by means of joint case constructions, and that of assistivity by dative case ones. The meaning of supervision is basically manifested through poly-predicative constructions.

causativity, causative verb, sociative causation, joint action, assistive, direct causation, indirect causation, category of voice

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