The syntax and semantics of helping: Sociative causation in Kinande

Abstract

Abstract We investigate the syntax and semantics of the sociative causative in Kinande (D42), a Bantu language spoken in eastern DRC. We present our discovery that Kinande, apparently unique among Bantu languages, grammaticalizes this type of causation with a specialized morpheme. In sociative causatives, the causer causes through social interaction rather than physical manipulation (direct causation) or words (indirect causation). We propose sociative causation in Kinande more exactly means ‘y carries out a subevent of P to help x do P.’ Helping here is by doing and is not comitative: rather, it is partitive – each actor does part of the action. This accounts for the classes of verbs that can undergo sociative causation. We establish that the construction is mono-clausal and note that the sociative morpheme is closely related to the benefactive applied morpheme. A second extension that occurs in this construction marks transitivity. We observe that the transitive extension can co-occur with the passive extension which tells us there is more than one voice projection in Kinande. Finally, we look more closely at the partitive reading of the caused event and note that the partitivity can be morpho-syntactically manifested either through partitive marking of the object of the caused event or through partitive marking of the caused event itself.