Causatives Research Articles

Complement sentences - complementizers of causative-manipulative verbs

This paper presents the key structural and semantic features of the complement sentences that have the primary function of direct or indirect objects of one type of causative verbs - causative-manipulative verbs. Since the syntactic literature frequently discusses the structural characteristics of the complement sentences, the main objective of this article is focused on the semantic diversity of this type of sentences. The goal of the article is to determine the dependence of the realized meaning of a sentence on the semantic type of the main verb. Although the conjunction da is a typical subordinator of these sentences, a series of communicative verbs allows the use of complement sentences with interrogative adverbs and pronouns in the function of conjunctions.

Talking about Causing Events

Questions about the nature of the relationship between language and extralinguistic cognition are old, but only recently has a new view emerged that allows for the systematic investigation of claims about linguistic structure, based on how it is understood or utilized outside of the language system. Our paper represents a case study for this interaction in the domain of event semantics. We adopt a transparency thesis about the relationship between linguistic structure and extralinguistic cognition, investigating whether different lexico-syntactic structures can differentially recruit the visual causal percept. A prominent analysis of causative verbs like move suggests reference to two distinct events and a causal relationship between them, whereas non-causative verbs like push do not so refer. In our study, we present English speakers with simple scenes that either do or do not support the perception of a causal link, and manipulate (between subjects) a one-sentence instruction for the evaluation of the scene. Preliminary results suggest that competent speakers of English are more likely to judge causative constructions than non-causative constructions as true of a scene where causal features are present in the scene. Implications for a new approach to the investigation of linguistic meanings and future directions are discussed.

Toward a deeper understanding of the ecological origins of distance construal

In the present research we elaborate on an ecological account (Fiedler, Jung, Wänke & Alexopoulos, 2012) for the unitary distance dimension postulated in construal-level theory, highlighting linguistic influences on distance regulation. We first replicate that distinct action verbs solicit similarly distant or close episodes in many judges, producing strong positive correlations between ratings of four distance aspects (time, space, probability, personal distance). A primary semantic–pragmatic dimension that accounts for a large part of the verb impact is valence: Negative action verbs trigger more distant episodes than positive verbs. Experiment 1 rules out an alternative explanation in terms of participants' mood. Experiment 2 cross-validates the valence effect with a new sample of affective state verbs. Consistent with implicit verb causality, state verbs solicit more distant episodes than action verbs, suggesting lack of intentional control and power as another semantic–pragmatic dimension. Experiment 3 supports this interpretation using high- and low-power nouns.

Towards an analysis of the causative/non-causative alternation in Udmurt

The paper studies the causative/non-causative alternation in Udmurt. I propose an analysis based on Distributed Morphology (Marantz 1984; 1997): I suggest that the causative and non-causative variants of the alternation in Udmurt are derived from roots and not from each other. The difference in the argument structure of the variants is due to the fact that as with verbs marked with the productive causative morpheme, the structure of causative verbs also always contains a Cause head (in the sense of Pylkkanen 2002; 2008). Non-causative verbs, on the other hand, have only a Voice head (in the sense of Kratzer 1996).

Subclassification of HI-Causatives in Korean

The purpose of this paper is to categorize Korean HI-causatives. Kim (1998) suggests a division into bi-clausal compositional causatives and mono-clausal lexical causatives. According to her suggestion, while compositional HI-causatives possess two verbs, lexical HI-causatives possess only one, since when the originally causative meaning is lost, the verb becomes one lexical item. However, some of the examples she provides cannot be accepted intuitively. An experiment was carried out in order to prove it. Each subject was given eight sentences, five with lexical and three with compositional causative verbs, and was asked to choose from among two pictures which they considered corresponding to the given sentence. Contrary to Kim’s (1998) suggestion, the result shows that Korean native speakers do not consider that HI-causatives are divided into two categories, compositional and lexical, but, instead, they are on a continuum from direct to indirect meaning semantically. According to this experiment, the continuum has mek-HI-ta ‘cause to eat’ at one end and pes-HI-ta ‘cause to take off’ at the far end. In addition, HI-causatives are context-sensitive, so that the context should be considered when native speakers use them.

Comprehension and Production of Psych Verbs in Korean

This study tests the complexity hypothesis that syntactic structures involving a more complex representation impose a greater processing load. I show that Korean psych verbs that exhibit a three-way structural distinction (Belletti & Rizzi 1988) differ in the syntactic and semantic complexity. In particular, the causative object Experiencer construction is associated with more structure and complex semantics, compared with the two types of subject Experiencer constructions. Experiment 1 demonstrates that the more complicated causative psych verb group incurs a higher processing cost. In Experiment 2, it is revealed that the causative configuration is less likely to be used when speakers have access to simpler structural options. The results of the present study on Korean psych verbs imply that the complexity hypothesis is functional at both comprehension and production levels. Comparisons and contrasts with English psych verb studies are discussed. Finally, some alternative accounts are considered and refuted.

Study on the Usage of ‘yure(ゆれ)’ in ‘sa’ Irregular Conjugation Verb and ‘su, sasu’ Causative Auxiliary Verb as Observed from Edo Period -Focused on the Transition to the Modern Language-

Study on the Usage of ‘yure(ゆれ)’ in ‘sa’ Irregular Conjugation Verb and ‘su, sasu’ Causative Auxiliary Verb as Observed from Edo Period -Focused on the Transition to the Modern Language-

Causative verbs in the grammar of Spanish heritage speakers

This study examines argument structure overgeneralizations among heritage speakers of Spanish who exhibit varying degrees of proficiency in the heritage language. Two questions motivated the design of the study: (1) Do heritage speakers differ from native speakers in their acceptance of causative errors? And if so, (2) which classes of verbs are most susceptible to this overgeneralization? A sentence acceptability task targeting two verb classes (unaccusatives and unergatives) was administered to 58 heritage speakers and a comparison group (n = 22) of monolingually-raised native speakers of Spanish. The results confirm that heritage speakers, in contrast to native speakers, accept causative errors with a variety of intransitive verbs. Unaccusative verbs are more readily accepted in transitive frames than unergatives for all groups. Acceptance rates for individual verbs are a function of the particular verb’s compatibility with external causation as well as the possibility of being transitive in English.

Causative Constructions: A Descriptive Analysis

This study is a descriptive study of causative constructions in Bassa language. It is a language classified as belonging to the Western Kru of Benue Congo (Blench, & Williamson, 2000:25; Crozier and Blench, 1992:32). Causative construction implies an expression where the caused event is depicted as taking place because someone does something or something happens, that is, if x hadn’t happened, y wouldn’t have happened. The process is characterized by two events such that one occurs at t1 and another at t2, and the occurrence of the first is responsible for the second event. Data for the study were sourced by a customized checklist, my native intuition as native speaker, and some written texts in Bassa. The work discovered that morphologically derived causative verbs could come from a verb or an adjective stem and in each case; it is characterized by transitivizing the derived verb with the resultant effect of increasing the argument by one to the basic structure and transformation of the arguments. In this case, the basic subject moves to the object position and the applied argument, that is, the causer argument becomes the subject of the derived mono-clausal structure. This work also discovered that when these processes occur, the applied subject is focalized, becomes the privileged argument and displaces the inherent subject and moves it below the predicate and the derived mono-clausal sentence from the complex sentence is economized.UJAH: Unizik Journal of Arts and Humanities vol 14 (2) 2013

Voice, lability, and causatives in Berber (II)

Voice, lability, and causatives in Berber (II)

‘Fa’ che non cadiamo in tentazione’ (Mt 6,13a). Interpretazione e traduzione della sesta petizione del Padre Nostro

This paper aims to examine the meaning of the sixth petition of the Lord’s Prayer in its context and in relation with James 1:13 in order to select the best Italian translation. Special focus has been put on the negation of a causative verb in Hebrew and Aramaic, its nuances and its translation into Greek. As a conclusion, the suggested Italian translation is “Fa’ che non cadiamo in tentazione”.

Rise of canonical objecthood with the Lithuanian verbs of pain

The present paper aims to uncover the processes governing the rise of canonical case-markings. Experiencer verbs with the ᴅᴀᴛExp–ɴᴏᴍStim case frame must necessarily first acquire canonical case marking on their second argument in order to enable the acquisition of the nominative by their first argument. The present paper concentrates, thus, on the acquisition of the accusative case by the second argument. Lithuanian verbs of pain are taken under scrutiny. I examine the change that leads to the acquisition of canonical objecthood, namely, the change from the original ᴅᴀᴛExp–ɴᴏᴍBodyPart case frame to the more canonical ᴅᴀᴛExp–ᴀᴄᴄBodyPart case frame. In the latter, the body-part argument not only acquires the canonical object marking, but also certain syntactic object properties as, for example, the obligatory change into genitive under negation. Strikingly, this change is only found with the verbs of pain skaudėti ‘to ache’ and dial. sopėti ‘to ache’ in Lithuanian, while other ᴅᴀᴛExp–ɴᴏᴍStim experiencer verbs do not undergo this change. I argue that the rise of the canonical object with ᴅᴀᴛExp–ɴᴏᴍBodyPart verbs of pain in Lithuanian is due to some analogical processes internal to the semantic class of verbs of pain and not to a general drift leading to the acquisition of canonical case assignments. Verbs of pain represent a more complex subclass of experiencer verbs in that they typically take three arguments, namely, experiencer, body-part and stimulus. Those verbs that encode all three participants of the pain event as core arguments typically have the following case frame in Baltic: ɴᴏᴍStim–ᴅᴀᴛExp–ᴀᴄᴄBodyPart. I argue that the loss of the stimulus position by some of these triadic causal verbs of pain let them conflate semantically with the dyadic stative ᴅᴀᴛExp–ɴᴏᴍBodyPart verbs of pain. This semantic merger results in the redundancy of the morphosyntactic variation between ᴅᴀᴛExp–ɴᴏᴍBodyPart and ᴅᴀᴛExp-ᴀᴄᴄBodyPart which, in turn, leads to a generalization of one particularcase frame: ᴅᴀᴛExp–ᴀᴄᴄBodyPart in the standard language and ᴅᴀᴛExp–ɴᴏᴍBodyPart in some dialects.

Japanese Causatives are Not Relevant To Lexical Integrity

AbstractProductive Japanese causative verbs appear to form a problem for the idea that the relation between morphology and syntax is characterised by lexical integrity, meaning that the internal structure of complex words is opaque to syntax. This is because such causatives show behaviour that indicates the verb and the causative morpheme head separate syntactic clauses underlyingly, so their structure must be syntactically transparent, but nevertheless the combination of verb and causative morpheme seems to be a morphological complex. In this paper I argue that, given a modular architecture of grammar, the module in which verb and causative morpheme might be argued to be a complex word is morpho‐phonology, which is not the module to which lexical integrity pertains. In the module to which this does pertain, morpho‐syntax, the productive causative morpheme is a free morpheme, rather than an affix, at all levels of representation. The construction is therefore not relevant to the question of whether or not lexical integrity holds. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relationship between the productive causative and the ‘lexical’ causative, which arguably does involve a morphological complex in morpho‐syntax as well as morpho‐phonology. It is argued that the occurrence of the same morpheme in syntactic causatives and some lexical causatives does not imperil its status as a free morpheme in the syntactic causative.

Revisiting Chinese-speaking children's understanding of argument structure

A causative verb is likely to appear in a sentence with two noun arguments, whereas a noncausative verb tends to appear in a sentence with a single argument. The present research investigates from what point children learning Chinese begin to show this knowledge of argument structure. Two-, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children were tested using a forced-choice pointing task. The results showed that Chinese-speaking children aged 2 years could associate a transitive construction with a causative event, whereas they were not able to map an intransitive construction to a noncausative event even after reaching 5 years of age. The reason why Chinese children have such difficulty in learning knowledge of intransitive construction is discussed, focusing on (a) the semantic properties of certain intransitive verbs, which have been found not only in Chinese but also in other languages, and (b) the ellipsis of arguments, which is characteristic of Chinese.

Reading Skill Moderates the Impact of Semantic Similarity and Causal Specificity on the Coherence of Explanations

Prior research has shown that readers are sensitive to causal relations between sentences. In addition, the extent to which readers put weight on causal relations seems to depend on their reading skill. Very little attention, however, has been given to the perception of causal relations linguistically expressed by different types of causal verbs within a sentence. This article reports an experiment that examined the influence of semantic similarity and causal specificity on the perceived comprehensibility and goodness of causal explanations. The results showed that semantic similarity in the form of an overlap of nouns between adjacent sentences exerted more influence on less-skilled readers' perceptions of the comprehensibility of explanations. Conversely, causal specificity in the form of verbs indicating causation with a particular result more strongly impacted more-skilled readers' perceptions of the goodness of explanations. The results suggest that, depending on their reading skill, readers have different standards of coherence that influence their judgments of different aspects of coherence. The findings are discussed in the context of validating the epistemic status of science-related explanations.

On Semantic Patterns of “Kill–Verbs” in Modern English

The article aims to reveal the semantic structures of the causative verbs in modern English, particularly with reference to the characteristics of the verbs meaning “to kill” and the way of expressing the main meaning of “to cause to die”. More precisely, the present article highlights the semantic features of these verbs that condition their causative nature. The article focuses on the investigation of only those verbs meaning “to cause to die” that are more frequent in speech, particularly the verbs to kill, to murder, to assassinate, to execute and to massacre. The linguistic data are borrowed from the British National Corpus.

Three Types of Syntactic Causatives in Korean.

Three Types of Syntactic Causatives in Korean.

The usage of cho and the comparison of cho with similar Japanese phrases

This research paper provides an in-depth look into the various ways of expressing the word cho by comparing them to words of similar meaning in Japanese, and provide Japanese students with an efficient way to learn this difficult word. The content describes how the meaning can be changed depending on the position of the word in a sentence, and what are its functions in that respective position. Cho is not only used as an agentive-dative-goal verb/verb indication of a source, but also as a causative verb, an imperative verb, or as an indicator of a purpose/ manner, etc.

A interferência da polissemia do verbo fazer em sentenças causativas: uma análise linguística e cognitiva

O objetivo deste artigo foi investigar se a polissemia do verbo fazer influencia na frequência de sentenças causativas (analíticas e semi-analíticas) construídas com esse verbo, tendo como aporte teórico os pressupostos da Linguística Teórica. Para isso, aplicamos o teste estatístico qui-quadrado, bem como o coeficiente de contingência modificado, visando a comparar o verbo causativo fazer (por ser mais polissêmico) com outros verbos causativos menos polissêmicos (assegurar, causar, cuidar, provar e provocar). As análises estatísticas e linguísticas demonstraram que há associação mediana (C*=0,53231) entre a polissemia do verbo fazer e sentenças causativas, embora a polissemia reduza a probabilidade de construções causativas com esse verbo.

Using DIY Corpus in Legal Translation: English Translation of Causative Verbs in Korean Statues

Using DIY Corpus in Legal Translation: English Translation of Causative Verbs in Korean Statues