Deriving Object Experiencer verbs in Oji-Cree

•I examine the causative use of the suffix -ishkaw in Oji-Cree, contrasting it with its instrumental use.•I argue that -ishkaw-causatives are Object Experiencer verbs.•I explore the idea that the (non-)agentivity puzzle in OE verbs can be reduced to structural properties of the causative head.

Many unrelated languages have a causative construction that involves a desiderative/experiencer reading of a causee in the presence of a non-agentive causer. The question that has concerned researchers working on these constructions is where the desiderative/experiencer reading comes from, and what accounts for the correlation between the non-agentivity of the causer and the interpretation of the causee as an experiencer. In this paper, I contribute to this debate by examining one such construction in Oji-Cree (Algonquian), the causative construction formed with the suffix -ishkaw. First, I demonstrate that -ishkaw-causatives exhibit two essential semantic properties of Object Experiencer verbs: non-volitional subject and psychologically affected object. Further, I develop an analysis of this construction arguing that the correlation between the non-agentivity of the causer and the desiderative/experiencer status of the causee can be reduced to purely structural terms: that of the correlation between the properties of an argument introduced by a head and the properties of the complement it selects. This paper, thus, contributes to the long-standing debate on the derivation of Object Experiencer verbs, and furthers our understanding of non-agentive causatives in general. The analysis also contributes to the field of Algonquian linguistics by revealing a full scope of meaning of a well-known verbal suffix, and more broadly, it supports the view of the Algonquian verb derivation as a syntactic rather than lexical process (e.g. Brittain, 2003, Hirose, 2003, Mathieu, 2008, Piggott and Newell, 2006, Ritter and Rosen, 2010 and Slavin, 2012).