Southwest Maluku is an ethnolinguistically complex zone on the Indonesian - East Timorese border. From a typological perspective its regional languages are fairly similar in having simple phonological inventories and little derivational morphology. Discarding the SOV word order of the non-Austronesian Oirata language on Kisar Island, also their syntactic patterns look very alike.

Unlike the neighbouring ethnolinguistic zones of Southeast Maluku and East Timor where a regional language managed to become the local contact language, Malay is the only vehicle for interethnic communication in Southwest Maluku. Melayu Tenggara Jauh (MJT, 'Far Southeast Malay'), mimics the syntactic structures of the regional languages while Colloquial Indonesian and East Indonesian Malay variants are the main sources for its lexicon.

Although some regional languages may feature remnants of a causative morphology, like Leti, all of them can indicate causation by combining a clause containing the verb 'to make' to a second clause containing another verb. MTJ, like many East Indonesian Malay variants, however, has two verbs for causation: kasi 'give' and bikin 'to make' that can be used in either a double verb construction (examples a& c), or a combined clause construction (examples b & d).

(a)	Dia kasi turun anak. 'He gets the child down.'		(b)	Dia bikin ketawa anak. 'He makes the child laugh.'
(c)	Dia kasi anak turun. 'He lets the child descend.'		(d)	Dia bikin [la] anak ketawa. 'He causes the child to laugh.'

This contribution analyses these constructions from a cognitive linguistic perspective. It intends to determine in how far the MTJ constructions diverge from similar ones in neighbouring Malay variants and whether they are influenced by the counterpart construction in the regional language(s).