Abstract

With insights of Talmy’s claim of Agonist and Antagonist in his force dynamic theory, this paper explores the English periphrastic causatives “Cause” and “Make” in the FLOB corpus (The Freiburg–LOB Corpus of British English). With purpose to figure out the similarities and differences between “Cause” and “Make” with additional semantic features, we introduce the methods of colligation and semantic prosody in corpus-driven analysis to explore and illustrate the distribution of the English periphrastic causatives “Cause” and “Make”. The research results indicate that: (1) Based on the colligation of the English periphrastic causatives “Cause” and “Make”, Talmy’s claim of the distribution of Agonist and Antagonist can be revised with more details in terms of the active and passive voice. That is, the distribution of Agonist and Antagonist keeps similar with each other in the colligations of English periphrastic causatives of “Cause” and “make”. Even though the colligations of “Make” are used more often than “Cause”, the Antagonist can be foregrounded as the subject and the Agonist is backgrounded as the direct object in the active voice. Meanwhile, the Agonist is foregrounded as the subject and the Antagonist is backgrounded as the direct object or sometimes omitted in the passive voice. (2) Moreover, “Cause” and “Make” bear some differences with regard to their semantic prosody. “Cause” tends to express negative situations, whereas “Make” remains neutral in its descriptions. In a nutshell, this study of English periphrastic causatives “cause & make” falls into the complementary framework of Talmy’s theory about force and causation.

Highlights

  • Similar to the cognitive concept of “metaphor”, the term of “causation” is considered as a common phenomenon we live by

  • Back to the research question with Talmy’s claim again, “without involving intransitive keep or prepositional/conjunctional because, in the force dynamic patterns Antagonist can be foregrounded as subject and the Agonist backgrounded as the direct object”, we find that only in the active voice within the force dynamic patterns, the Antagonist such as in the example (2) a and (2) b can be foregrounded as subject and and the Agonist backgrounded as the direct object, while in the (2) c of the passive voice, the causative situation changes -- the Agonist is foregrounded as subject and the Antagonist is backgrounded as the direct object which is the logical subject

  • Even though the colligations of “Make” spread more widely than “Cause”, the ANT is foregrounded as subject and the AGO is backgrounded as the direct object in the active voice

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Summary

Introduction

Similar to the cognitive concept of “metaphor”, the term of “causation” is considered as a common phenomenon we live by. B. Alice caused the door to open. Based on pioneer linguists’ conclusion, such as “[1, 2, 11,12,13, 18,19,20,21]”, periphrastic causatives can express causal relations with two verbs, for example in (1) b, one is the matrix verb caused in the matrix clause to express the notion of causing event, while the other is the embedded verb open in the embedded clause to express the notion of caused event. Lin Yu: So Similar, So Different – A Corpus-driven Method of English Periphrastic Causatives “Make” in the English Periphrastic Causatives from the perspective of colligation and semantic prosody in corpus linguistics.

A Brief Literature Review of English Periphrastic Causatives
Theoretical Background
Research Questions
Methodology
A Corpus-driven Analysis of English Periphrastic Causatives
Colligation
12 Zones A provision which caused us some concern stemmed
20 But anxiety can also cause you not to take any action
Semantic Prosody
Conclusion
Full Text
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