The SA verbs as the result of detransitivization
The productivity and full vitality of detransitivization in Cariban is quite striking, as the preceding tables show. If one adds to this the fact that detransitivized verb stems conjugate exactly like SA verbs (all the four grammatical parameters examined in Section 2 treat detransitivized verbs and SA verbs alike), it becomes hard to separate them out. As a matter of fact, a closer look at a list of SA verbs quickly reveals that almost all of them bear at least a reflex of the detransitivizing prefix. In most cases, the transitive source exists as an independent verb in the language. In many of the cases for which no transitive source was found in a given language (a minority), a potential source was found in some other language, thus suggesting that the verb in question was detransitivized but that its source was lost. Thus, it appears that detransitivization is the source for almost all the SA verbs, at least etymologically (and synchronically as well, according to Derbyshire’s 1985 analysis of Hixkaryana, Hoff’s 1968 analysis of Kari’ña, and Koehn and Koehn’s 1986 analysis of Apalaí). This is illustrated with the Tiriyó examples in (1).
(1)
Incidentally, if detransitivization is taken into account, the unexpected reflexive semantics of causativized verbs become understandable. Consider the Tiriyó examples in 2a-b, involving the transitive causative suffix-po.
(2)
If (2b) is interpreted as a reflexive (or SA) verb being causativized, it does not seem natural that the meaning should be reflexive to the causer, rather than reflexive to the causee; the expected meaning is ‘you made him/her bathe him/ herself’, as in Figure 1.
The actual meaning, ‘you made him/her bathe you’, is suggestive of an analysis in which an already causativized verb is detransitivized, as shown in the diagram in Figure 2.
