A version of this paper was published in Spanish in the volume Lenguas yuotaztecas: Acercamienta a su diversidad lingüística, ed by Karen Dakin and José Luis Moctezuma, 2014, here:

In this article we offer a systematic analysis of Hiaki direct and indirect causatives, paying particular attention to the behavior of Causees. We show that the Causee is never optional, but it is in fact either obligatory or forbidden in the direct and indirect Hiaki causatives, respectively. The central part of the paper presents a series of tests that effectively demonstrate the mandatory presence of the Causee in direct causatives and its obligatory absence in indirect causatives in Hiaki, and propose an analysis which exploits the split-VP architecture of Hale and Keyser (1993), Kratzer (1996). The difference in Causees between the two causatives are ascribed to the different selectional restrictions which we claim they impose, the direct causative selecting a VoiceP and the indirect causative a lower verbal projection. The rest of the paper discusses a problematic class of verbs which allow the optional presence of Causees in Hiaki indirect causatives, weakening the proposal. We argue that the limited context of occurrence of such examples and their association with a very reduced set of verbs suggests that this apparent optionality is not derived from the syntax of Hiaki indirect causatives, but from the internal properties of the limited set of the caused verbs themselves.