An Event Semantic Structure Analysis of Shona Causative Constructions

Abstract

This paper analyses the semantics of causative constructions in Shona, employing the Event structure Approach (Davidson, D. (1967). “The Logical Form of Action Sentences.”). We argue that Shona can be accounted well through the neo-Davidsonian approaches particularly because of the need to accommodate the agglutinative nature of the language. In this paper, causative constructions are taken as accomplishment verbs whose predication is a complex one. The causative is a complex event construction that is made up of subevents that are constrained through time-participant connectedness, making sure that the complex event is a sum of different subevents, which upon their union, form a single complex predicate that has its own combinatorial capacity, subcategorizing for its own arguments.