Inner and outer causatives in Austronesian: a diachronic perspective (original) (raw)

Austronesian causatives and transitivity related morphology present several challenges to linguistic theory. As discussed by Travis (2010), some Austronesian languages, like Malagasy, appear to transparently reflect a layered VP structure with an inner “lexical” causative and an outer productive causative. Other languages, like Tagalog, present unexpected morphology-syntax mismatches in this area. I discuss here certain puzzles in transitivity related prefixes from a historical perspective building on the idea that contrast preservation and epenthesis played a large role in the behavior of two key historical affixes: *paR- and *paN-.