Causative Constructions in Afaan Oromoo: Formal and semantic perspectives

Abstract

, Ethiopia) Abstract: The main objective of this study is to give descriptions of formal and functional aspects of causative constructions in Afaan Oromoo. To achieve the objective, written texts, native speaker informants and introspections are predominantly used as sources of data. The findings reveal that the three structural aspects of causatives- morphological, lexical and syntactic- are used in the language. Morphological causatives are highly productive, and affixes with -s and -i in several combinations as well as -eess are employed for such purposes. Causative Morphemes are detected to derive causatives of basic verb stems of different semantic categories and to involve causations in word-class changing. There are also simple and complex causations in which there are several causatives suffixes, causers and micro-events indicated morphologically and syntactically. Semantically, direct, indirect, and assistive/cooperative causatives are identified. Pseudo-causatives are uncovered as peculiar futures of the language too. There are, even, structures with explicit causative affixes which are called subjectless causatives, but they do not show any causal relations between the participants in