Cause in Accusative Marked Argument vs. Dative Marked Argument

3. Cause in Accusative Marked Argument vs. Dative Marked Argument

Dirven’s (1997) and Radden’s (1989) investigations of the ways emotional causality is expressed by means of English prepositional phrases show that emotional causality in English has been shown to be strongly framed by the spatial configurations of the prepositions. They found that the main distinction between uncontrollable and controllable types of emotional causality in English is paramount

for most prepositions, and only with some prepositions is this distinction weaker or neutral.

12 a. Sheila was mad at/about her own negligence.

b. Sheila was mad at John over what he had done to her. (Dirven 1997:68)

According to Dirven, the emotional concept metaphorized in mad is the idea of

“anger” or “fury”. This emotion is triggered by Sheila’s own negligence in (12a) and also directed at it: this is what they call a target cause, “since ‘at’ not only denotes the cause but also the response to it in a reflexive mental motion”. (Dirven 1997:69)

Dirven(1997) also found that the conceptualization of emotional causality by means of English prepositional phrases runs along clearly delimited groups of prepositions:

physiological reactions and controllable actions caused by emotion events are conceptualized by the image schemata of a container (in, out), a companion (with), or frontness (for); the stimulus event triggering the emotion or a motion image (about, over) related to a surface. (Dirven 1997:78)

Though Saisiyat does not have prepositions, similar distinctions in emotion causality are made in terms of case marking:

13 a. yao tikot hi ‘obay 1S.Nom be-afraid-AF Acc ‘obay ‘I am afraid of Obay.’

b. yao tikot ‘ini’ ‘obay 1S.Nom be-afraid-AF Dat ‘obay ‘I am afraid of Obay.’

The two sentences denote two subtly different situations. Sentence 13a is uttered when Obay is in front of the speaker or in a place visually accessible to the speaker, while sentence 13b does not have such an implication.

14a. yao tikot ka lalyu 1S.Nom be-afraid-AF Acc earthquake ‘I am afraid of earthquake.’

b. yao tikot no lalyu 1S.Nom be-afraid-AF Dat earthquake

‘I am afraid of earthquake.’

Sentence 14a is likely to be uttered when the earthquake is occurring at the time of the speech act, whereas sentence 14b is used to refers to any generic earthquake. It seems that the grammatical transitivity is iconic to the transitivity of the experiencer’s emotion directed to the target that at the same time is also the cause event that arouses the emotion.

Differences in case marking has nothing to do with the definiteness of the NP, since the following pair of sentences parallels the difference seen in (15):

15a. yao tikot ka ahoe’ ni ‘obay 1S.Nom be-afraid-AF Acc dog Gen ‘obay ‘I am afraid of Obay’s dog.’

b. yao tikot no ahoe’ ni ‘obay 1S.Nom be-afraid-AF Dat dog Gen ‘obay ‘I am afraid of Obay’s dog.’

Nor is the selection of the different cases related to the idiosyncratic valence of individual emotion terms; such contrastive pair can be found in almost all the emotion or psych verbs in Saisiyat.

16a. yao siya atomal 1S.Nom be-happy-AF very

‘I am very happy.’

b. yao siya hi ‘obay 1S.Nom be-happy-AF Acc ‘obay

‘I am happy with Obay.’

c. yao siya no ‘obay 1S.Nom be-happy-AF Dat ‘obay

‘I am happy for/ because of Obay.’

17. a. yao boe’oe hi ‘obay 1.S.Nom be-angry-AF Acc ‘obay ‘I am angry at Obay.’

b. yao boe’oe no ‘obay 1.S.Nom be-angry-AF Dat ‘obay

‘I am angry with Obay.’

18. a. yao soma-awhay hi ‘obay 1S.Nom be-impressed-bad-AF Acc ‘obay ‘I have a bad impression of Obay.’

b. yao soma-awhay ‘ini’ ‘obay 1S.Nom be-impressed-bad-AF Dat ‘obay ‘I have a bad impression of Obay.’

Note that such contrastive pairs marked by differences in case marking are found not only in emotion verbs, but also found in ditransitive verbs, as shown for example:

19a. sia ‘am mobay ka ‘aehae’ kaka’a’ ka korkoring 3S.Nom Asp give-AF Acc one pen/pencil Acc child

‘He is going to give a pencil to the child/children’

b. sia ‘am mobay ka ‘aehae’ kaka’a’ no korkoring 3S.Nom Asp give-AF Acc one pen/pencil Dat child

‘He is going to give a pencil to the child/children’

20a. yao ‘am s-om-aoe’ ka k-in-aat ka korkoring 1S.Nom Asp offer-AF Acc book Acc child ‘I will give the child/children a book (as a gift).’

b. yao ‘am s-om-aoe’ ka k-in-aat no korkoring 1S.Nom Asp offer-AF Acc book Dat child ‘I will give the child/children a book (as a gift).

In these two pairs, the how and the when the action of ‘giving or offering’ is performed affects the case the animate argument assumes. When the accusative case marker is selected, it is usually in situations where that the agent performs an action directed at the recipient, whereas the dative case marker marks only a potential beneficiary; whether there is a specific recipient that the speaker has in mind is immaterial. Therefore, the choice of the case markers can be said to reflect differences in transitivity.

In the same vein, the choice of the accusative case or the dative case as the cause of emotion verbs also reflect the transitivity of the emotion event. When the accusative is

selected, the cause is what Dirven called ‘target cause’, which is the cause that arouses the emotional state in the experiencer, but the emotion state is in turn a cause inducing the emotional reaction directed toward the target. On the other hand, when the dative case is selected, the cause is not necessary the target.

4. Cause in si- (RF) Construction and Cause in pa- (Causative) Construction