Himalayan Linguistics

Liangmai, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Manipur and Nagaland, has causative constructions as one of its morpho-syntactic aspects. The purpose of this paper is to examine the morphological processes involved in causative constructions in the language. Liangmai have a productive strategy for forming causatives from all kinds of non-causative verbs. All verbs, intransitive and transitive, form their corresponding morphological causatives by prefixing the causative marker pí-. Another productive causative prefix used in the language is kám-, which causativises intransitive verbs. Besides these two morphological prefixal causative constructions, causative is also expressed lexically by suppletion in the language. The occurrence and the form of double causation is also discussed in the paper.