The Nivkh Causative From a Formal and Typological Perspective

Pavel Grashchenkov
Lomonosov Moscow State University

Annotation: The paper discusses the distributional and semantic characteristics of causative suffixes in Nivkh. It begins by introducing the typology of causation, focusing particularly on languages belonging to the Altaic family. Subsequently, it outlines the features of Nivkh causatives based primarily on prior research and textual illustrations. The study demonstrates that Nivkh causatives diverge from their counterparts in Turkic languages in several ways. Specifically, they are not recursive, can not verbalize and do not allow contact reading with unaccusatives. Following an analytical framework previously applied to Turkic and certain other languages, this work elucidates the properties of Nivkh causatives. It establishes that, similar to some other languages within and in accordance with the decompositional perspective, Nivkh employs a dual voice marker for its causatives. However, unlike Turkic, Nivkh allows distinct syntactic positions for each of the two voice heads.

Keywords: Nivkh, typology, syntax, morphology, causativization, vP structure

For citation: Grashchenkov P. The Nivkh causative from a formal and typological perspective. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2025. Vol. 8, iss. 1. Pp. 32–55. (In Rus.) doi: 10.37632/PI.2025.20.97.002