Common Karyoł has a very old causativizing prefix in te-, which is transparently related to the full verb te ‘to earn’. In addition to raising the valence of intransitive verbs (and it could only function on intransitive verbs), causativizing te– also was able to turn nouns into verbs, e.g. telac ‘to put at ease’ < lac ‘nudity’. The prefix has long ceased to be productive, but it’s far from uncommon – All the same, because of semantic drift speakers tend not to recognize the relationship between an unmarked form and the same form marked with te-, or if they do, the relationship is understood to be derivational and not inflectional.
After causativizing te– ceases to be productive Karyoł speakers develop several periphrastic valence-increasing devices to adhere to their language’s strict transitivity requirements. We’re looking at the year -800 AT or thereabouts – perhaps 100 years later. The verbs amta ‘to give’, heła ‘to send’, and balha ‘to set down, to set up’ are the most commonly used to raise valence, and they should be thought of as serial verb constructions, rather than quasi-auxiliary constructions, in that both the lexical verb and the function verb both act as head of the phrase together; neither takes the
Among those forms that don’t already have a te-marked counterpart, quite a few verb classes are incompatible with the new periphrastic causatives: verbs of posture, stative verbs, copulae, verbs of perception, verbs of bodily function (with the exception of laho ‘to weep’ which may co-occur with any of amta, heła or balha, and which has a te-counterpart telaho ‘to pour water from a container’), some ingestive verbs, and the verb amta itself.
amta is notable in that it is the only form that accepts a transitive main verb. When combining with a transitive lexical verb, the A of the lexical verb becomes the new O, and the O may either be omitted (most usual) or may be expressed in a ri-marked phrase (next most likely) or in a locative phrase (rare). When combined with an ambitransitive, for example tweaba ‘to load wares (O1) into a wagon (O2), however, the result is a transitive with no change of A and with the loss of O2, and with the additional overtone that the action be done with a great deal of energy.
amta is more likely to combine with a verb that assigns a less-forceful role to A, so that (be)cyon ‘to follow is a more likely candidate than akka ‘to take by force, to pillage, to rape’, but this is only a tendency.
amta is also the only one of the three forms able to co-occur with those ingestive verbs that can be causativized: okal amta ‘to feed’ < okal ‘to eat’, wuti amta ‘to nurse a baby’ < wuti ‘to suck on’. Verbs such as gowe ‘to drink’ and im ‘to swallow’ don’t combine with causative quasi-auxiliaries. amta may also occur with a subset of verbs which otherwise combine with balha to form idiomatic expressions: naotba amta ‘to raise a group’s morale in dark times’ < naotba ‘to begin, to start out’.
balha is overwhelming the most productive of the three. Essentially any intransitive action-process verb may combine with balha to suggest that the new A was somehow involved in initiating the action atēce tyohka urka balhama ‘I spooked the rabbit, caused it to run away (but I don’t necessarily know how I managed to do it)’. heła, on the other hand, definitely implies that the new A takes a volitional and even forceful role: atēce tyohka urka hanta ‘I chased the rabbit away’.
In the North, and later in Larlaroł, amta is appears in the same role that heła does in the rest of the Karyoł-speaking community, in part because the perfective of heła, hanta, sound so much like amta in rapid speech; we can see evidence of this confusion in that the lemma form amta and never its perfective amma is used in this construction.
In the Larlaroł of 0 AT amta may combine as an affix of the form –anta, in part influenced by the relative participle in –Vnta: tweabanta ‘to heave’, okalanta ‘to feed’, urkanta ‘to chase’. (I picked these three forms specifically because they all have irregular relative participles: tweonta, okanta, and suppletive oganta, respectively. Don’t want to confuse myself just quite yet.) Their specific meanings are conditioned by the original sense of the serial construction: Note that the first and the third example definitely have undertones of force, but that the second does not. These –anta forms are defective in that they have no specific perfective form; ergative alignment alone is used with these to signal the perfective.
balha remains in all dialects the only productive form able to combine with new vocabulary, although it still may not combine with intransitives. In order to suggest that someone made someone else perform a transitive action, some sort of biclausal construction would need to be employed. That I’ll have to work out later.