Basque to Azerbaijani: the dative in a causative can identify the reader, not a recipient
A person marked with -ri may perform the embedded action
Basque irakasleak emakumeari liburua irakurrarazi dio describes a teacher making a woman read a book. The woman performs the reading; she is not simply receiving a book. For an Azerbaijani translation, this is a useful warning against treating every Basque dative phrase as an indirect object of giving.
Compare emakumeak liburua irakurri du, where the woman reads the book without a separately expressed external human causer. Adding the teacher and the causative verb changes responsibility for initiating the event. Retaining the reading but dropping that additional participant would turn an account of directed activity into an account of independent reading.
Recover two layers of participation before rebuilding the target verb
Laka’s grammar explains the Basque transitive causative by distinguishing the causer, marked ergative, from the causee, marked dative. The book remains the object of reading. These three roles are more informative for translation than the surface order of the nouns or the familiar label indirect object.
The Azerbaijani Universal Dependencies description places causative marking within the verbal structure, before later categories such as negation, tense and person. Consequently, a target verb can express causation without requiring a separate word corresponding mechanically to every part of the Basque expression. This morphological possibility does not eliminate the need to keep the reader and the initiator distinct.
In an account of a classroom activity, the important question may be whether the teacher read aloud or required a learner to read. Those are different events even when the same book appears in both. Build the Azerbaijani clause around the intended reader before deciding how to express the teacher’s involvement; otherwise a fluent sentence can assign the actual performance to the wrong person.
Do not mistake case variation for a different number of events
Laka also gives umea etorri da for a child coming. With causation added, the child can be marked absolutive; a dative alternative is described for western varieties with animate, preferably human, causees. This regional distinction means that dative marking is not a universal prerequisite for recognizing a Basque causative.
For a message about arranging somebody’s attendance, distinguish the arrival itself from causing that arrival. A dative participant in this construction need not be somebody to whom an object travels. Conversely, an absolutive child need not be the only participant involved in bringing about the visit. The causative predicate supplies the extra relationship.
Azerbaijani noun endings should therefore follow the target construction selected for the event, rather than preserve a Basque case label at any cost. First identify the initiator, the performer and any affected object. Then preserve whether the source actually states causation. This keeps the teacher separate from the reader and a child’s arrival separate from somebody else bringing it about.
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