Himalayan Linguistics

The present paper is an attempt to describe and analyse the structure of causatives in Hmar, a Kuki-Chin subgroup of the Tibeto-Burman language family, spoken by around 98,550 speakers as per the Census of India, 2011. This paper discusses the two types of causatives in the language: Morphological and Lexical. Hmar has two morphological causative forms, viz the prefix /sùk-/ and suffix /-tìr/, that are productively employed in the derivation of causative structures. Lexical causatives, on the other hand, are uncommon and unproductive. The language is found to have a handful of causative forms that can be considered as fragments of the historical causative morphology. However, they are discussed under lexical causatives as they are irregular and no longer productive as a morphological operation. The paper further discusses the phenomenon of double causation in the language and identifies two patterns of deriving double causative structures.