Causatives

Abstract

A causative is a linguistic expression referring to a situation consisting of a certain event and a force responsible for the realization of it, as seen in the following examples, where the addressee is understood as the cause of laughing of the addresser: English You make me laugh = Lithuanian Tu mane juok-in-i (2sg.nom1sg.acc laugh-caus-prs.2sg). These examples illustrate two major types of causative expressions, where make and -in- serve as markers of causative relations. English employs a free form, and the construction is termed periphrastic (or analytic, syntactic) causative, while Lithuanian uses an affix, and this type is referred to as morphological causative. There are other formal means beside affixation to form morphological causatives, such as reduplication, vowel, consonant, and tone alternations. The periphrastic causatives can be monoclausal or biclausal in their structure, and the monoclausal ones are sometimes specifically referred to as syntactic causatives. In addition to that, lexical causatives can be recognized if a predicate bearing no synchronically transparent relation to another predicate is interpreted as causative on semantic grounds. For example, in the English sentence You killed him, one may paraphrase kill as “cause to die” and argue that kill stands in causative relation with respect to die. Some authors also use the term “lexical causative” when talking about nonproductive and/or semitransparent formations, which typically disallow ambiguity of adverb scope. With regard to semantics, causatives can be factitive (as English make) or permissive (as English let), the causing force may operate directly or indirectly (by certain intermediate actions), and a number of other parameters can be shown to be relevant. It has been argued that these semantic parameters also bear a relation to the formal means of expression of causatives, such as direct causation expressed by morphological causatives and indirect one by periphrastic constructions. Within a larger context, causatives are interpreted as valency-changing operations, which add a causer as an agent (“you” in the previous examples) and demote the subject of the base predicate, which becomes the causee and can be marked as a certain object (“me” in the previous examples). The principles governing the marking of the causee, such as “the paradigm case” and “the semantic role approach,” have been one of the main topics in the study of causatives. The syntax of causative constructions is usually also discussed in the studies dealing with transitivity and voice (see further references in the separate Oxford Bibliographies article in Linguistics “Transitivity and Voice”).