Hazel Mitchley presented her work ‘Transitivization, causative constructions, and the thematic licensing of external arguments‘ at the 96th Annual Meeting of the LSA that took place from Jan. 6–9, 2022.
Here’s the short abstract of the talk:
“I argue for the bifurcation of VoiceP into two distinct projections: one which thematically licenses the external argument (EA) variable, and one which saturates or binds it. I show that the transitivizer in Kinande (Bantu) cannot be analyzed as either Voice, a Cause head, or v, and must instead be analyzed as the realization of a distinct head responsible for thematically licensing the EA. This is then shown to account for that fact that in Kinande causative constructions the causee is thematically licensed below Cause, even though Cause cannot embed VoiceP.
Check out her poster here : LSA (2022) causatives & transitivizers FINAL