Causal necessity, causal sufficiency, and the implications of causative verbs

Abstract

Against past analyses, we propose that natural language causatives do not universally encode a single, unanalyzable bringing about meaning like Dowty’s (1979) CAUSE, but instead draw on an inventory of contrasting causal dependency relations. To illustrate this claim, we focus on the English causative verbs make and cause. We point out a number of differences in their inferential profiles, and argue that these follow from the fact that cause asserts a relation of causal necessity between a cause and its stated effect, while make asserts causal sufficiency. We distinguish these notions from their alethic counterparts: while causal necessity is similar to the notion of counterfactual necessity (Lewis 1973), causal sufficiency has not figured in previous analyses of causal language. We show that analyzing make as a sufficiency causative not only accounts for the similarities and differences between its distribution and that of cause, but also enables us to explain previously puzzling inferences associated with the use of make as opposed to other periphrastic causatives.