In press. Butt. Miriam, `Constraining Argument Merger through Aspect'. In E. Hinrichs, A. Kathol, and T. Nakazawa (Eds.), Complex Predicates in Nonderivational Syntax, Syntax and Semantics Volume 30, Academic Press.
In this paper, I summarize my LFG analysis of Urdu complex predicates such as the permissive and the "aspectual" light verbs, and show how it applies to the morphological causative. In particular, I formulate the conditions on argument fusion as parallel to those of syntactic control and take up Alsina and Joshi's (1991) proposal of crosslinguistic parametrization over causativization as a potential challenge to my strict formulation of argument fusion. Unlike in many other proposals, argument structure in this paper is viewed as a syntactic level of representation that captures the lexical properties of a predicate which help determine the syntactic realization of the predicate's arguments, i.e., their grammatical functions and case markings. In recasting Alsina and Joshi's analysis of causative alternations across languages, I argue (basically following Ramchand 1997) that the linking of thematic information to grammatical functions is sensitive to aspectual information associated with each argument of a predicate in the a-structure. Thus, an alternation in the case marking of the causee found in Romance, Bantu and Urdu/Hindi, which is generally associated with the degree of ``affectedness'' of the causee is accounted for in terms of the aspectual properties of the arguments.