Causatives in Shabaki Vol. 4 (2010), 2 79 CAUSATIVES IN SHABAKI Abbas H. J. As-Sultan Kufa, Iraq Summary: This paper aims at investigating the causative continuum in Sha- baki. Based on the framework developed by Mathieu-Reeves (2006), this study tries to test Haiman's iconicity principle. It has been observed that in Shabaki all common types of causatives exist and form a continuum. The lexical causatives are the most direct type because there the linguistic dis- tance is least. The analytical causatives are the most indirect type because there the linguistic distance is greatest. 1. Introduction The term Shabaki itself is used to refer to both the people and the language of the Shabaki minority. Shabaki is an inflectional language with mainly but not exclusively SOV word order. It is a member of the Indo-Iranian language fa- mily of the Indo-European branch. It is a minority language existing in the Northern County of Mosul in Iraq. Like Turkish, Japanese or Finnish, Shabaki is an agglutinating language where morphemes have single semantic meanings and are simply connected linearly (yâna.gal.mân: house.s.our: our houses). Shabaki has borrowed a lot of lexical items from Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish. The most striking feature of the language is the presence of light verb construc- tions which are very productive. They consist of a noun or an adjective followed by a light verb, such as kar ‘to do’, beda ‘to give’, pek ‘to hit’, bastân ‘to buy’, bor ‘to eat’, bror ‘to bring out’, bakêş ‘to pull’, etc. The meaning of a light verb construction is non-compositional in the way that its meaning cannot be ob- tained by literally translating its parts. Examples are: çam pek (lit. ‘eye’ + ‘to hit’, meaning ‘to look at’); garm kar (lit. ‘hot’ + ‘to make’, meaning ‘to heat’ or ‘to boil’); re kar (lit. ‘road’ + ‘to make’, meaning ‘to walk’). In this paper, I will argue that there is a continuum of directness which supports Haiman's theory. The lexical causative corresponds to the expressions of lesser linguistic dis- tance, the analytical causative to expressions of greater linguistic distance, and the morphological causative to the in-between. 2. The Causative The causative, or the causative clause, is the linguistic expression for causation. Causation is a somewhat abstract concept in which the occurrence of one event results in the occurrence of a separate new event [Mathieu-Reeves 2006: 95]. Every human language has linguistic means to express causation. These linguis- tic means vary. However there are some parts concerning causative expressions that seem to be the same in all languages. These are the following: a. Causer: the initiator of the causative process/ the agent of predicate of cause. b. Causee: the entity which is changed or influenced by the causer/ the agent of effect.