Towards an analysis of the causative/non-causative alternation in Udmurt

Abstract

The paper studies the causative/non-causative alternation in Udmurt. I propose an analysis based on Distributed Morphology (Marantz 1984; 1997): I suggest that the causative and non-causative variants of the alternation in Udmurt are derived from roots and not from each other. The difference in the argument structure of the variants is due to the fact that as with verbs marked with the productive causative morpheme, the structure of causative verbs also always contains a Cause head (in the sense of Pylkkanen 2002; 2008). Non-causative verbs, on the other hand, have only a Voice head (in the sense of Kratzer 1996).