Ma-causatives in Tomo Kan Dogon: between causatives and passives

This article deals with the causative/passive polysemy in the Tomo Kan language (< Dogon < Niger-Congo). The aim of the article is to describe semantic and syntactic properties of the distant causative -má and the homonymous modal passive which are instantiations of the same morpheme. First, I show that the causative can be analyzed as a marker of distant causal relation, whereas the modal passive is a marker with the meaning of participant-external possibility. Second, I discuss a possible polysemy scenario based on the structural properties of the causative. Namely, I will argue that the passive reading could not have arisen from permissive readings of the causative marker and it is better to describe the shift in terms of subject deletion, which led to the reanalysis of the syntactic structure.