On one typological rarity: The causative in Tsugni Dargwa

The paper deals with a typologically rare and perhaps even unique case of causative marking attested in the dialect of Tsugni (Dargwa group, Nakh-Dagestanian family). Whereas all dialects and languages of the Dargwa group that have been described before express the causative by a suffix (the suffix -aq in most cases), the causative derivation in Tsugni is marked by a stress shift — from the verbal stem to the infl ectional suffix following it. In this connection, the paper also describes the stress patterns attested in the verbs in Tsugni and some other Dargwa dialects. In the final part of the paper we discuss how this unusual marking pattern could arise and what its lexical source could be.