Causative alternation in Tibetic and Trans‑Himalayan

Abstract

Abstract The article revisits the causative voicing alternation attested in a restricted number of fossilised lexical pairs in various sub-branches of the Trans-Himalayan language family. I introduce linguistic facts from the Tibetic languages which have not been previously investigated and point to shortcomings in arguments previously put forward. With new data from Old Literary Tibetan, the article lends support to the devoicing hypothesis according to which causative verbs with voiceless root consonants were derived from a-causative voiced verbs through the prefix *s‑: *s+√G acaus > √K caus . By ordering linguistic facts about Tibetic historical morphology, the article demonstrates the existence of several processes of causative derivation that can be aligned chronologically, thereby helping to resolve some of the burning problems in Trans-Himalayan verb morphology. Consequently, two distinct derivational patterns are reconstructed to Proto-Trans-Himalayan: I. acaus √G‑ > caus √K‑, and II. caus *s‑ ⪤ acaus * ᴺ ‑, revealing two causative prefixes, *s 1 ‑ and *s 2 ‑.