He jumped off the bridge CAUS she told him to: indirect speech as a means of expressing indirect causation in Wubuy

Abstract

Causation is usually described as consisting of two main types: direct and indirect causation. These are often conceptualised as the poles of a semantic continuum, and crosslinguistically, this semantic continuum reflects a pattern of grammaticalisation/ lexicalisation (Shibatani 1976, c.f. Comrie 1981, Shibatani and Pardeshi 2001). However, this tendency has received little attention within the Australian context, where the focus has been on morphological causative forms. I begin to address this gap by considering how both morphological and syntactic methods are used to express causation in Wubuy, a language from northern Australia. I find that direct causation can generally be expressed via morphological derivational processes, whereas indirect causation cannot. When the causation is indirect, Wubuy speakers favour a syntactic construction that has never before been described for this language and which is also typologically uncommon for Australian languages more generally: indirect speech. This both contradicts Heath’s (1984: 559) claim that Wubuy has no indirect speech construction and supports the crosslinguistic generalisations in the literature.