Causatives 315
2.8 The meaning/function of -agi and Indonesian -kan
Compared to -e, -agi appears to play a role in more disparate structures, making
attempts at a unified account on largely semantic grounds relatively more diffi-
cult. In recent work, Cole & Son (2004) and Son & Cole (2008) have made
proposals regarding Indonesian -kan which may shed some light on the appro-
priate analysis of -agi. In Son & Cole (2008), they propose that -kan is a mor-
phological reflex of a primitive semantic predicate RESULT, which they hypo-
thesize is a part of the semantic event structure in the relevant construction.
They maintain that it is this RESULT head in the abstract structure that induces
the causative meaning as well as the endpoint of a path and so on. It is unclear
that -agi would be open to the same analysis inasmuch as instances of -agi in
causatives are not significantly greater than instances of -e in causatives. In
addition, Madurese contains the dedicated causative morpheme pa-.
In earlier work, Cole & Son (2004) propose a unified account of -kan as a
derivational morpheme affecting argument structure, specifically a morpheme
that licenses an argument in the argument structure that the base verb does not
itself license syntactically. As they note in their 2008 work, however, it is not
clear that argument structure is always affected, as in the case of -kan occurring
on the verb when the beneficiary is a prepositional object or in the case of the
specification of an endpoint. While it is not clear that this analysis can be ap-
plied part and parcel to -agi, aspects of it are appealing. A similar type of analy-
sis in terms of argument structure and voice is entertained in section 4, but ulti-
mately no unified analysis can be sustained.
3. Causatives
In most uses of -e and -agi, the semantic valence of a verb remains constant; the
change is in the alignment of semantic arguments with syntactic structure, spe-
cifically with core arguments. This is true with the use of -e with ditransitives,
verbs of communication, verbs of cognition, and so on, and the use of -agi with
most transitive verbs, verbs of communications, instrumental constructions, and
so on. However, data in sections 1.6 and 2.4 demonstrate that with some intran-
sitive predicates in some instances affixation of -e or -agi changes the semantic
valence, licensing an additional argument of causation. However, neither is the
primary means of forming causative structures. The principal manner of form-
ing morphological causatives is affixation of the causative prefix pa- (Chapter 4
section 1.1.7). In this section both synthetic (affixal) and periphrastic (syntactic)
causatives are detailed.
The majority of synthetic causatives take the prefix pa- as in (123b) and
(124b).