Do Active/Stative languages have Causatives?

Previous linguistic researchers, including me, have called the mamuk- (in the Southern Dialect munk-) formation of verbs a “Causative”, which isn’t totally wrong.

However…

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Additional years of work with Chinuk Wawa (Chinook Jargon) have surprisingly shown that this is an Active/Stative language. So the Jargon is not

1. Nominative/Accusative like English, or
2. Ergative/Absolutive like another Indo-European language, Hindi-Urdu.

For me, that fact suggests we need to revisit the idea of CW’s mamuk- being a Causative, in the sense seen in those other syntactic alignments (1) & (2). 

Y’know? Like, how is the “Causative” of a Stative verb gonna work??

There’s always been a sorta outlying subset of mamuk- verbs, in that some have resisted explanation in simplistic semantic terms as ‘to cause to ___’. 

Contrast the more tractable and “normal Causative”-seeming mamuk-forms such as these verbal inflections (N = Northern Dialect)…

• mamuk-kə́mtəks (inflecting an Active psychological-state verb)
  make-X.knows
  ‘to teach X; inform X, N: make X aware (of)’
• mamuk-kúli (inflecting an Active physical-movement verb) 
  make-X.runs(.around)
  ‘to chase X; N: circulate (X information)’

…with the following weirdies…

• (A) Inflecting adjectives:
  • mamuk-x̣aʔx̣aʔ
    make-X.is.sacred
    ‘to worship X’ (not *’sanctify X’*)
  • mamuk-kʰə́ltəs
    make-X.is.worthless
    ‘to disrespect X, insult X’ (not literally *’devalue X’*)
  • mamuk-masáchi
    make-X.is.mean/evil
    ‘to treat badly, mistreat’ (not *’make someone be evil’*)
  • N: mamuk-ɬax̣áwyam 
    make-X.is.poor/pitiful
    ‘to have pity on, do a favor for’ (not *’impoverish’*)

• (B) Inflecting nouns that can denote people (which are thus adjective-like): 
  • N: mamuk-tayi
    make-X.is.chief
    ‘to honor X’ (not *’elect X as chief’*)
  • mamuk-kə́ləkələ (‘bird’ seems to be an Indigenous metaphor for ‘idiot’)
    make-X.is.bird 
    ‘to fool’ (not *’turn into a literal bird’*) 
• (C) And inflecting nouns that denote natural resources: 
  • mamuk-samən
    make-X.is.salmon
    ‘to work in a cannery; to fish for salmon’ 
  • mamuk-lakamas
    make-X.is.camas
    ‘to dig camas’
  • mamuk-stik
    make-X.is.tree
    ‘to log (cut timber)’
  • N: mamuk-tipsu
    make-X.is.grass
    ‘to cut hay’

Now, what (A), (B), and (C) have in common among themselves is this:

The predictable (if hitherto unexpected) outcome of prefixing mamuk- is to add an Active Subject, which is the same thing as happens with the Active verbs taking mamuk-:

• An Active Subject + ‘be sacred’ gives you ‘to worship’.
• An Active Subject + ‘be a chief’ gives you ‘to honor’ someone.
• An Active Subject + ‘be camas’ gives you ‘to harvest camas’.

Note! Other nouns, for example those denoting human-made items, don’t betray to my eyes any mutated meaning when preceded by /mamuk/, so it’s therefore impossible to determine whether that’s the freestanding verb mámuk or the bound prefix mamuk-. Putting this in other words, any /mamuk/ with a human-made product (which is thus already notionally an Object) adds an Active Subject, the manufacturer: 

• mamuk(-)háws
  make(-)house
  ‘to build a house’
• mamuk(-)mə́kʰmək
  make(-)food
  ‘to prepare food’ 

(If you really, really need for some reason to express ’cause to be a house / turn it into a house’ or ’cause to be a chief / make her/him into a chief’, you can do do that with a different, periphrastic (indirect) approach: mámuk pus háws X ‘make it so that X is a house’, mámuk pus mə́kʰmək X ‘make it so that X is food’!)

So I’d say we now have a unified theory of mamuk-. It has a single meaning, ‘added Active Subject’. 

A useful spinoff of realizing this is:– We can exploit the slightly different shades of meaning in the English-language translations of such mamuk-forms, in order to make learners more aware of some important Chinuk Wawa grammatical categories: 

• mamuk- plus an Active verb gives you ‘to cause’ someone else to do that action. 
• mamuk- plus a descriptor Stative gives you ‘to treat someone else as if they were ____’.
• mamuk- plus a literal-noun Stative gives you ‘to be the relevant human for that noun’.
• And I’d better not leave this out: mamuk- plus the location-copula Stative gives you ‘to be the human causing that physical situation’: 
  • mamuk-míɬayt (inflecting a Stative locative copula, to use a term from my dissertation) 
    make-be.there
    ‘to put (there), to place’ 

So then my feeling, and I’m interested in what my readers think, is that Chinuk Wawa’s mamuk- can indeed be called a “Causative”, in the accepted sense of “adding a non-object, core, argument”.

But it very much seems to me that, in an Active/Stative-aligned language such as this, the result of Causativizing Statives can end up being quite different from what you get in English. This makes sense. English has only quite limited Statives (essentially whatever’s coded with the verb “to be”), in contrast with the Jargon’s repertoire of stems that also encompasses nouns…

Bonus fact:

One way in which the Statives in Chinook Jargon get treated in a grammatically different way from Actives is in the Imperative mood. Actives let you just “leave out the Subject”, as in nánich!, ‘look!’ Statives, however, make you say a lot more, as in ɬúsh pus táyi mayka!, ‘be the chief!’ (Literally ‘It’s good if you’re the chief!’) 

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?