The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Monday, March 24 at 3 pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/16ZiB1ATRMGSUxbkGOJGvw.
Emma Custer (McGill) will be discussing “Causee-less causatives in Wolof.” Here is Emma’s abstract:
In this talk, I investigate argument structure in Wolof causative constructions, focusing on the relationship between semantic roles and syntactic valency with two causative morphemes: -loo and –lu. Whereas –loo licenses an additional syntactic argument as expected, –lu seems to introduce a new semantic role only, involving an implicit causee interpreted existentially as ‘someone’ in most contexts (similar to English ‘I had John cook the fish’ versus ‘I had the fish cooked’). While an existing approach to –loo and –lu in Dakar Wolof analyzes them as distinct morphemes heading different syntactic projections (Buell & Sy 2005), I argue they are in fact allomorphs instantiating the same syntactic head, Caus, in Saint-Louis Wolof. To this end, I present novel findings about the distribution and ordering of the two morphemes relative to other suffixes, focusing in particular on the interaction of –lu and –loo with causative/benefactive –al. I then explore what conditions the allomorphy. In the literature, there are two predominant approaches to –lu-type causatives: in some languages, the implicit causee is not syntactically represented, and Caus takes a vP complement rather than a VoiceP complement (e.g., Tubino-Blanco 2010/Harley 2017). In other languages, the implicit causee is syntactically represented and Caus always takes a VoiceP complement, but a null pronoun is merged in Spec,VoiceP (Sigurðsson & Wood 2021; Berra, Odria & Fernández 2025). I show that, if a generalization about the distribution of benefactive –al is true, neither approach captures the Wolof data. Instead, my working hypothesis is that the spell-out of Caus as –loo or –lu depends on whether or not CausP projects a specifier position.