Ergatividade cindida, papel temático e causativização na língua Ka'apor

Fábio Bonfim Duarte, Mário Alexandre Garcia
2006 Revista de Estudos da Linguagem  
This paper examines the Case and theta role assignment to DPs in the Ka'apor language. Our hypothesis is that Ka'apor manifests a split Case system, which may be triggered either by the semantic nature of stative predicates or by the DPs that receive the theta role "paciente/theme". In addition to this, we propose that the enclitic particle [.ke] may be described as the (absolutive) Case and thematic role assignment to object and to subject of unaccusative verbs. We also postulate that the
more » ... tive prefix {mu-~ m-}, which occurs in ergative predicates, is the morphological manifestation of the light verb. Finally, we propose to extend the obligatory Case parameter in order to explain the split Case system of the Ka'apor. Thus, we suggest that Spec-TP is activated for assigning the (nominative-absolutive) structural Case to the subjects of active transitive, unergative and unaccusative verbs and Spec-vP is activated for assigning the absolutive Case to the object and to the subject of stative verbs. Keywords Split Case, theta role, causative verb and Obligatory Case Parameter (OCP).
doi:10.17851/2237-2083.14.2.277-315 fatcat:ytxffbmkhzdrfkckqc3u2izpcm