Spanish to Sesotho: cooking for someone is different from making them cook
Le preparé comida makes the other person a beneficiary
Spanish Le preparé comida says that the speaker prepared food for somebody. Le hice preparar comida can instead say that the speaker caused somebody else to prepare food. The small word le occurs in both, but the person it refers to has a different relationship to the cooking. A Sesotho translation needs to preserve that distinction.
Katherine Demuth’s grammatical sketch distinguishes the Sesotho causative extension -is- from the applicative or benefactive extension -el-. Her examples include cooking food for a person and making children wash blankets. The former introduces a beneficiary; the latter introduces someone who performs an action because another participant causes it.
The same Spanish person can receive help or receive an instruction
Imagine a Spanish account of preparing a meal for a neighbour. Le cociné comida presents the neighbour as receiving the benefit of the speaker’s cooking. Le hice cocinar presents the neighbour as the person made to cook. Substituting one relationship for the other could turn a helpful action into an account of imposing work.
The Sesotho example Thabo ó-mó-pheh-éts-é di-jó illustrates cooking food for him in Demuth’s analysis. Its verbal form contains the applicative together with perfect morphology. A reader should not infer from a longer derived verb that the beneficiary has become the cook: additional morphology can introduce a participant without assigning that participant the main action.
Conversely, the causative example involving an aunt and children does not simply mean that the aunt washes blankets for the children. The children do the washing. Spanish can express that difference through hacer plus another verb or a clause with que; Sesotho can encode causation through a verbal extension in the illustrated construction.
Who benefits and who acts can both matter in one sentence
Spanish Hice que los niños prepararan comida para su abuela contains both a caused action and a beneficiary. The children prepare the food, the grandmother benefits, and the speaker causes the preparation. Removing either relationship changes the distribution of work and benefit even if the target still contains words for children, food, and grandmother.
Demuth discusses restrictions on combining causative and applicative extensions, including their order. These are grammatical constraints, not instructions to build a target verb by attaching a guessed suffix for every Spanish hacer or para. The actual Sesotho verb and construction determine which combinations are available.
For the meal account, first separate the person initiating the action, the person actually cooking, and the person for whom the food is prepared. Spanish le alone does not determine all three roles. The cited Sesotho constructions explain why a translation can need different verbal morphology for “I cooked for them” and “I made them cook,” rather than treating both as equivalent statements that someone received food.
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