Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

interpreting [ni] 10 as locative, whereas the contextual meaning of the clause clearly calls
for a causative interpretation. None of the theories that have been applied to examples
like (7) can be considered descriptively adequate, but the line of argument exemplified by
the OO hypothesis, in particular, the fact that benefactive arguments seem to be
differentiated from causee arguments (where the nominal phrases themselves are both
followed by the animate dative postposition, *-ra) by the alternation between the dative
infix (prototypically *-na-) and the directive infix (prototypically *-ni-) is presumably a
valid characterization in empirical terms at some level of description. Any new proposals
must make sense of these descriptive facts in the long run, but I have chosen to narrow
the scope of this study to a proper subset of the verbs bearing the *bi-√ prefix, leaving the
more elaborate alternatives involving animate causees and benefactives for future study.
My point, however, is that the directive case hypothesis is overly complex in
morphological terms and makes extensive use of homophonous segments such as /ni/ that
are analyzed in distinctive ways (locative [ni] 10 as opposed to animate directive
[n] 5/6-[i] 10) so as to resolve inconsistencies within the directive case hypothesis itself. In
the following section, I propose an alternative solution to one subset of the
morphosyntactic facts addressed by the directive case hypothesis. Where the directive
case hypothesis postulates increasingly complex and empirically fragile morphological
segmentations, my proposal juxtaposes lexical classes of several types to
morphosyntactically defined components of the verbal prefix (such as “applicative” or
“causative”) to yield meanings that are equivalent, or in some cases, even more precise
than the values proposed in the directive case hypothesis.
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