Expressing Causation in Hittite

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Expressing Causation in Hittite
Dr. Andrej Shatskov

Veranstaltungsdetails

Der Vortrag findet am 15.7. um 18.15 Uhr im MagEIA-Haus statt: Domerschulstraße 1; Zugang auch durch Bibrastraße 14 (im Mutterhausareal der Schwestern des Erlösers), 97070 Würzburg.

Abstract

The talk will focus on markers of causativity in Hittite. The first part of the talk will discuss the history and the distribution of the five markers that could express causation, with special attention to the suffixes ‑nu- and ‑ahh‑ that were highly productive and in later periods could be added to the same words. The second part of the talk will be devoted to the grammatical semantics of the causative markers. Even though Hittite verbal suffixes ‑nu‑ and ‑ahh‑ and infix -nin- are generally assumed to have a causative meaning, these markers often do not increase valency, and several verbs with these markers are in fact intransitive. In these cases the markers must have an intensive or a telicizing function. Such a polysemy is well-attested cross-linguistically and can be explained within the framework of semantic approach to transitivity.