Construcciones causativas en euskera

Abstract

In this paper I describe, within the theoretical framework of Relational Grammar (RG) (Perlmutter 1983, Rosen and Pelmutter 1984, Postal and Joseph 1990), two causative constructions with the verb erazi in Basque. I argue that one of these constructions exhibits properties of both mono-clausal and bi-clausal sentences, whereas the other causative construction does not exhibit any property of mono-clausal sentences. I propose an analysis that considers the causative construction that exhibits mono-clausal properties an instance of Clause Union (Aissen and Perlmutter 1983, Fauconnier 1983, Gibson and Raposo 1986). I also state the generalizations that predict both i) when Clause Union is possible in Basque and ii) what the final Grammatical Relations will be in a Clause Union construction in Basque. Such generalizations are possible thanks to two basic assumptions of RG; namely, i) grammatical relations are primitives of the theory, non-definable in terms of already existing notions, and ii) the structure ofa clause may have several levels of syntactic representation.