What Happened to “The King Had His Daughter Sent for”? —A Multi-Perspective Approach to English Periphrastic Causative Construction

Abstract

Based on the question of “what happened to the king has his daughter sent for”, this paper aims to get a contrastive analysis of English periphrastic causative construction of [X HAVE Y Vpp] from different perspectives including Langacker’s action chain theory, Dixon’s nine semantic parameters ' framework, Talmy’s causal-chain windowing analysis and Wolff’s force theory. The research results show that 1) Dixon’s semantic parameters’ framework could provide much detailed information in the causative situation, yet most of the “Yes/No” question to correspond each semantic parameters could not solve all the problems such as the transitivity, the control of the causee, etc. 2) Both Langacker’s action chain theory and Talmy’s causal-chain windowing analysis seem a little similar, yet the latter one could supply with more information. 3) In Langacker’s description of action chain in causative construction: there is also a slight change in adding the link not only at the beginning of action chain, but also in the middle of the action chain. 4) Wolff’s force theory is quite flexible with different concrete directions of all possibly included parameters, yet it might be better if adding some information form Dixon’s semantic parameters.