Aspectual Differences Between Agentive and Non-agentive Uses of Causative Predicates

Abstract

This paper aims to provide an account for why, across languages, the zero-change (or failed-attempt) use of causative predicates is easier to obtain with agent subjects than with causer subjects. The paper is structured as follows. Section 8.2 reports experimental studies suggesting that the degree of acceptance of the zero-change use at study varies across languages and across types of causative verbs, focusing on Mandarin run-of-the-mill (extensional) monomorphemic causative verbs on one hand, and French and English defeasible (modal) causative predicates on the other. This difference is accounted for in Sect. 8.7. Section 8.3 identifies the source of the zero-change use for these two sets of languages, namely outer aspect for Mandarin extensional causatives, and sublexical modality for English or French defeasible causatives. Section 8.4 spells out an issue raised by Martin’s (2015) account of the link between agentivity and non-culmination. Section 8.5 shows how the Voice head introducing agents vs. causers combines with causative vps, and how the semantic difference between these two voice heads influences the interpretation of the vp-event, and, in particular, the way the causing event type denoted by the vp is tokenized. More precisely, it is argued that in the agentive use, the causative event type denoted by the vp is ‘fleshed out’ by complex events composed of an action of x and a change-of-state (CoS) of the theme’s referent y, whereas in the non-agentive use, the very same causing event type is fleshed out by CoS of the theme’s referent only, themselves caused by the eventuality denoted by the subject. On this view, if we abstract away from the external argument, a non-agentive causative vp is interpreted the same way as its anticausative counterpart. It is then argued that the semantic difference between the two voice heads ultimately explains why typically, zero-change uses of causative vps are acceptable with agents only, starting with extensional causative verbs in Sect. 8.6.1, and then addressing defeasible (modal) causative verbs in Sect. 8.6.2. Section 8.8 accounts for why the zero-change reading is occasionally accepted by some speakers even with a causer subject.