The lexical underspecification of Bantu causatives and applicatives

This paper presents original evidence for an additional merge location and se- mantic interpretation of Bantu applicatives, drawing on complex multiply applicativized and causativized constructions for empirical support. The paper also identifies and discusses challenging data from Bantu causatives. Previous analyses of causative and applicative constructions in the world’s languages have enumerated different kinds of causative and applicative heads, stored separately in the lexicon, each with their own particular selectional requirements. As the number of attested structural positions, potential complements, and semantic interpretations for these heads grow in the literature, however, the model bloats and becomes less compelling. I ultimately adopt a recent analysis from Wood & Marantz (2017) and assert that a single underspecified argument introducer is sufficient to account for the Bantu data I present. In order to accommodate the new theory of argument introduction, I also propose a new, more semantically-oriented, model of causative complement selection.