An Event-Based Account of -kan Constructions in Standard Indonesian

A widely held position in the literature on verbal meaning is that the lexical-semantic representation of verbsinvolvescomplex event structureswith semantic primitiveslike CAUSE and BECOME (e.g. Dowty 1979). A growing number of recent workson predicate decomposition have shown that there is a close correlation between the semantics of event structure and the syntax (e.g. Hale & Keyser 1993, Harley 1995, Travis 2000, van Hout 2000, Ramchand 2003, 2007). Thisarticle presentsan additional empirical argument for the view that there isa direct mapping between semantic decomposition of predicates and the (morpho)syntax by developing an explicit analysis of the semantics and syntax of the verbal suffix -kan in Standard Indonesian. We argue that -kan isa morphological reflex of the RESULT head, the semantics of which givesris e to a causative interpretation. By treating -kan as being sensitive to a syntactic configuration involving a result state, the current analysis not only provides important empirical support for the event decomposition of predicates in the syntax but also leads to a unified semantic and syntactic account of -kan, which captures straightforwardly distributional properties of the suffix.