Causative constructions in Bodo-Garo

Abstract

The Bodo-Garo group of languages consisting of Kāchārī or Bodo, Lālung (autonym Tiwa), Dīmā-sā, Gārō, Koch, Rābhā, Tipurā (autonym Kokborok), Chutiyā (autonym Deori) and Morān (Grierson 1903) are mainly spoken by about four million people in north-east India.1 BG exhibit systematic processes of formation of causative verbs through prefixation, suffixation and very rarely, infixation. Lexical causative verbs are also employed in these languages whereas periphrastic causatives are found in the form of verb stacking. This study aims at finding out the causative prefixes which co-occur with the root verbs to form their causative counterparts; categorizing the prefixes in terms of their occurrences with certain roots; and, analyzing the environments and linguistic conditioning of the occurrences of the prefixes. This study also discusses several syntactic and semantic features associated with causation.