The causal-noncausal alternation in the Northern Tungusic languages of Russia

Languages differ widely in the way they code causal-noncausal alternations, in
which a verb event is either presented as happening by itself (the noncausal event)
or as being instigated by an external causer (the causal event). Some languages,
such as English, tend not to make a morphological distinction; rather, the same
form of certain verbs can express both a causal and a noncausal event,
depending on the context. Other languages, such as Romanian or Russian, have a strong
tendency to mark the noncausal event morphologically, while yet others, such as
Turkish, tend to code the causal event with morphological means (Haspelmath
1993).

We here investigate the causal-noncausal alternation in Even, Negidal, and Evenki,
three Northern Tungusic languages spoken in the Russian Federation, in a
cross-linguistic perspective. In these languages, morphological means for decreasing and
increasing valency predominate, although equipollence – in which both forms are
morphologically marked without one being derivable from the other – is a salient
strategy for verbs of destruction. Although we find broadly comparable coding
patterns in these and other Tungusic languages that are similar to what is found
in other languages of Northern Asia, there are numerous intriguing differences at
a fine-grained level.