Causative

12 Key excerpts on "Causative"

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  Mouton Classics

  From Syntax to Cognition. From Phonology to Text

  • (Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The marking of the causee is a consequence of conceived differences in its role in the causal event, which relate to such aspects of event structure as (in)directness of causation and frelatedly) degree of agency and affectedness of participants. Such factors are elements of certain general conceptual models of causation. This approach not only has wider empirical coverage than syntactic, hier-archy-based accounts, but is simple, unified, has greater explanatory power both for cross-linguistic Variation and for intricate intralinguistic distribu-tional facts; finally, it accords with a cognitively-based view of language, in which the knowledge underlying grammar is not qualitatively different from other aspects of human understanding and reasoning. 1. Introduction The grammar of Causative constructions has inspired what is probably one of the most extensive hteratures in modern Linguistics. Such intensive 452 Suzanne Kemmer and Arie Verhagen [116] scrutiny has no doubt been motivated in part by the fascinating complexi-ties of Causatives both within particular languages and cross-linguistically; but, in addition, there seems to have been a tacit recognition by many linguists that an understanding of Causatives is fundamental to an under-standing of clause structure as a whole. A common approach to Causatives is to consider them to be derived by reduction, either of clauses or predicates. Comrie (1976: 303), for example, states that Causative constructions result from the compression of an underlying complex structure with embedding into a derived struc-ture Simplex sentence. The basic idea in this approach is to posit an underlying biclausal structure and use some syntactic manipulations to arrive at a single clause (e.g. raising rules, clause union, etc.). This type of account is found in a number of derivational syntactic theories of the last twenty years.

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  Predicates and Terms in Functional Grammar

  • A. M. Bolkestein, C. de Groot, J. L. Mackenzie, A. M. Bolkestein, C. de Groot, J. L. Mackenzie(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  1.2. Causativity: a working definition The term causativity is usually used with reference to a state of affairs in which there is a causer and a causee, and the causer brings it about that the causee performs an action, undergoes a process (or experience) or is in a state. The causer may be a human Agent, as in (1) and (2) or a Force, as in (3). The MODERN HEBREW CausativeS 239 causee too may be human, as in (1) and (2), or a non-human entity as in (3). The definition of the Causative construction may focus on the situation, as does the definition in Comrie (1981a), on matters of logic and truth value, as in Shibatani (1976), on syntactic features and syntactic derivation, as in Cole (1976) and Berman (1979), or on the syntactic process and the semantic changes affecting the participants, as in Saad & Bolozky (1980). In Dik (1980a: ch. 3) causativity is treated as a process of predicate forma-tion by which the predicate frame of an active predicate undergoes an increase in the number of arguments, and a change in meaning. A Causative predicate has the following meaning definition: (13) a causer x^ brings it about that a causee x^ perform the act or be in the state designated by the predicate. The definition of Causative constructions used in this paper is based on (13), but is somewhat more general, because (13) refers only to one of the Dutch Causative constructions, those with the verb laten, whereas the Hebrew Causatives treated in this paper are semantically and syntactically of a wider range. The working definition of Causative constructions in this paper is as follows: (14) a Causative construction is a construction which designates a state of affairs A in which a causer x^ brings it about that a causee x^ performs an act or is in the state designated by the predicate. When considering Causative constructions, the following distinction will be made: a distinction between two predicates involved, i.e.

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  Linguistic Typology

  Morphology and Syntax

  • Jae Jung Song(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5

  Causatives

       

  5.1

  Introduction

  The Causative construction generally represents a linguistic expression which denotes a complex macro-situation consisting of two micro-situations or component events (cf. Nedjalkov and Silnitsky 1973: 1, Comrie 1989: 165–6): (i) the causing event in which the causer does or initiates something in order to bring about a different event (i.e. the caused event), and (ii) the caused event in which the causee carries out an action or undergoes a change of condition or state as a result of the causer’s action. The following English sentence thus denotes a Causative situation, for instance.

  (1) Elizabeth made the chef eat the leftovers.

  In (1 ), having the desire or wish to have the leftovers consumed, the causer (or Elizabeth ) did (or said) something, and as a result of that action the causee (or the chef ) in turn carried out the action of eating the leftovers, thereby satisfying the causer’s desire or wish. Note that in (1 ) the fact that the causer had had the desire or wish is not explicitly indicated at all but rather simply assumed to be antecedent to the causer’s action (see 5.9 for discussion).

  Further observations about the Causative construction can be made on the basis of the example in (1 ). First, the causer’s action is expressed by the predicate of cause made , and the causee’s action by the predicate of effect eat ; these predicates happen to be separate lexical verbs in (1 ). Second, the actual action performed by the causer, as opposed to the action performed by the causee, is highly ‘abtractized’ down to the simple expression of causation. In other words, ‘[a]U that is expressed by the predicate representing the causing event… is the pure notion of cause … without more specific lexical content’ (Kemmer and Verhagen 1994: 117). Third, the causer NP and the predicate of cause are ‘foregrounded’ in opposition to the causee NP and the predicate of effect. That is, in (1 ) the causer NP is the subject NP of the whole Causative sentence and the predicate of cause the main verb of that sentence. The causee NP and the predicate of effect, on the other hand, are ‘backgrounded’ in the sense that they do not occupy as prominent positions in the sentence as do the causer NP and the predicate of cause. For instance, the causee NP in (1 ) behaves grammatically as the direct object NP; it can potentially appear as the subject NP of the corresponding passive sentence (i.e. The chef was made to eat the leftovers by Elizabeth ). The predicate of effect is also not a full-fledged verb, lacking the ability to host verbal markings, e.g. tense, number, etc. (e.g. * Elizabeth makes the chef eats the leftovers

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  Language Typology and Language Universals 2.Teilband

  • Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible, Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  886 X. Syntactic Typology 66. Causati ves 1. Definitions 2. Formal types of Causatives 3. Causative and related categories 4. Syntax of Causative constructions 5. The semantics of Causative verbs 6. Diachronic sources of Causative affixes 7. Special abbreviations 8. References 1. Definitions Causatives can be defined as verbs which re-fer to a Causative situation, that is, to a causal relation between two events, one of which (P2) is believed by the speaker to be caused by another (Pi); cf. e.g. Nedjalkov & Sil'-nickij 1969a, 1973; Kastovsky 1973. In other words, a Causative is a verb or verbal con-struction meaning 'cause to V 0 ', 'make V 0 where V 0 stands for the embedded base verb. (For other possible definitions of Causatives, see §3.1.). Examples of Causative construc-tions (hereafter, CC) are (1 — 3): (1) John opened the door (2) Peter made John go (3) Turkish (Comrie 1976: 263) Ali Hasan-i öl-dür-dü A1ì:NOM Hasan-Acc die-CAUS-PAST 'Ali killed Hasan.' Opened, made go, and öl-dür-dü in (1 — 3) are Causative verbs, because they refer to causal relations between causing events ('John did sth.', 'Peter did sth.', 'Ali did sth.') and caused events ('the door opened', 'John went', 'Hasan died') and thus all mean 'CAUSE to V 0 ' ('cause to open', 'cause to go', 'cause to die'). In some languages Causative markers apply to both verbs and nomináis (nouns, adjectives), forming verbs with the meaning 'make Q', where Q is a quality or the like (transformatif in Mel'cuk 1994: 323-324). This is, for instance, the case in Lakota, Na-huatl (cf. Tuggy 1987: 607-614) and many Austronesian languages. So, for example, in Karo Batak we find galang 'big' — pe -galang 'expand' and similarly in Acehnese duek 'sit' — peu -duek 'to place', raja 'king' — peu -raja 'make king; treat as a king', dit 'few' — peu-dit 'make few' (Durie 1985: 78 — 81); see also §5.1.4.

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  A Reference Grammar of Caijia

  An Unclassified Language of Guizhou

  • Shanshan Lü(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 6   Analytic Causative constructions

  6.1  Introduction

  A Causative construction is a complex situation involving two events, i.e. the causing event and the caused event (Shibatani 1976 : 1, Song 2001 : 256–259) or the cause and its effect (Comrie 1989 : 165). It is characterized by an additional argument, the causer (Dixon 2000 : 30, Creissels 2006b : 59). Analytic or periphrastic Causatives are one of the three major forms of Causatives, while the others are morphological (e.g. by affixing, tone change, reduplication etc. [Dixon 2000 ]) and lexical Causatives (e.g. eat vs. feed, kill vs. die in English). “The prototypical case of the analytic Causative is where there are separate predicates expressing the notion of causation and the predicate of the effect” (Comrie 1989 : 167). In other words, an analytic Causative construction is biclausal, as pointed out by Song (2013) , for example, John made me go there in English. A language may use more than one Causative construction and how languages structure Causatives may be related with different semantic parameters (Dixon 2000 ), for example, direct versus indirect causation.

  In Sinitic languages, analytic Causatives are derived from pivot constructions, NPCAUSER + V1 + NPCAUSEE + V2 , in which the verbs in the V1 position develop into Causative verbs (Chappell and Peyraube 2006 , see also Thepkanjana and Uehara [2008: 631–632] for a similar construction with ‘give’ in Thai). Major sources for the Causative verbs in Sinitic are (Chappell 2015a ):

  i .Speech act verbs

  ii .do, put

  iii .give

  iv .wait

  v. contact

  Some of these have grammaticalized into passive agent markers (Chappell 2015b : 32). Among these, the verbs of ‘giving’ are cross-linguistically attested as a common source for Causatives verbs (Newman 1996 : 171–200, Heine and Kuteva 2002 : 152) and can be treated as an areal feature in East and Southeast Asian languages on the basis of the linguistic data available (Matisoff 1991 , Heine and Kuteva 2002 : 152, Lord et al. 2002

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  Contemporary Linguistic Parameters

  • Antonio Fabregas, Jaume Mateu, Michael Putnam(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  In another line of approach, Causative meaning arises compositionally in a more literal sense, rather than as the meaning of a particular predicate, the cause head. Different implementations of the idea that causation is the interpretation of a structure in which a dynamic event embeds another event (or state) appear in Cuervo (2003, to appear), Marantz (2005), and Ramchand (2008). Focusing on zero-morphology direct Causatives in English and Spanish, Cuervo (to appear) argues that change of state predicates such as break do not mean “cause to become broken” but more directly “make be broken,” an interpretation of a dynamic vdo which takes a state (vPbe) as complement. Direct causation in this view is equated with causing a state, as opposed to indirect causation (expressed by periphrastic Causatives in English and Spanish), which embeds a dynamic event (either agentive VoiceP or non-agentive unaccusative vPgo). 9 Languages can vary parametrically along these lines. 6.3.4. Further correlations in variation Two main correlations have been noted between dimensions of variation in Causative constructions. One correlation has been established between the morphological expression or form of the Causative and the directness of the Causative meaning, such that the smaller the morphology (from lexical to periphrastic Causatives) the more direct the Causative meaning (Comrie 1981; Dixon 2000). The second is a robust generalization between the position of the Causative and its interpretation, such that the higher the morpheme in the structure, the more indirect the causation. Are these two correlations connected? Are they the expression of the same under-lying phenomenon? Can one be subsumed or derived from the other? Svenonious (2005) discusses the differences between “outer” Causatives (higher) and “inner” Causatives as they emerge from a series of languages which have two distinguishable constructions. Svenonious notes the following association of properties.

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  The Grammaticalization of 'Give' + Infinitive

  A Comparative Study of Russian, Polish, and Czech

  • Ruprecht Waldenfels(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Heterogeneity is expected, since items are not categorized as either lexical or grammatical, but rather situated in a continuum between two extreme points. Formants in di ff erent stages of grammaticalization may compete in the expression of cer-tain meanings; this is called layering . At the same time, some lexical item may have retained its identity as a lexical item in one context and acquired a new, more grammatical function in another: an example is going as an in-flected form of go in I’m going home or as a future marker in I’m going to call you . Such a development is called divergence . Lastly, the meaning and use of grammaticalized items may still involve elements that are inherited from less grammaticalized stages, explaining cross-linguistic di ff erences in grammatical meaning; this is referred to as persistence . Persistence as well as variation plays an important role in this study, especially regarding Polish, which is analyzed to be in a state of transition. 14 Introduction, overview and theoretical framework 1.3. Causatives 1.3.1. Definitions and basic notions In their seminal article on Causative constructions, Nedjalkov & Sil’nickij (1969) define a Causative construction on the basis of the notion of a Causative situation. Semantically, a Causative situation is a situation composed of a causing and a caused (micro)situation: The sun ( = causer ) shines . causing microsituation ⇒ The ice ( = causee ) melts . caused microsituation Causative macrosituation : The sun melts the ice Semantically, the main participant of the caused situation will be called causee , the main participant of the causing situation a causer . Note that in such a situation-based treatment of Causatives, neither causer nor causee needs to be a prototypical agent, such as in the above example.

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  Pragmatics, Linguistics, Language and Literature

  Essays in Honour of Efurosibina Adegbija

  • (Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cuvillier Verlag

    (Publisher)

  In reference to the definition of causation, causativity must, therefore, rely on a grammaticalization of events, which are perceived to persist in a causal connection, i.e. event 2 occurs if and only if event 1 has occurred. This includes cases where event 1 and 2 are both caused by a third event and the functioning or even existence of said event is opaque to the observer. Across languages, events are commonly grammaticalized as inflected verbal forms. The simplest, most direct grammaticalization would, therefore, package cause and effect in two separate clauses, cause clause and effect clause (biclausal causativity). A more fused way packages cause and effect into one clause with either one inflected verbal element plus another infinitive (to-inf or bare), called periphrastic Causatives or into one clause with one transitive verb, a verb class commonly called Causatives (cf. Levin, 1993; Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 1995, among many others). A natural way is for biclausal causativity to preserve the temporal order of the events, cf. (1) John kicked the ball and the ball demolished the window. The coordinating conjunction establishes temporal seriality which is, strictly speaking, not identical with causality; but for a listener, it would be implausible to assume that the ball in clause 1 is not identical with the ball in clause 2. Biclausal causativity is, therefore, Low-level implemen- tations Physical symbol systems Mental structures, language Dieses Werk ist copyrightgeschützt und darf in keiner Form vervielfältigt werden noch an Dritte weitergegeben werden. Es gilt nur für den persönlichen Gebrauch. 76 Christoph Haase basically a one-to-one mapping of perceived reality into linguistic reality. A more sophisticated way for biclausal causativity is a reversal of the positions of cause clause and effect clause with conjunctions like because : (2) The window broke because John kicked a ball through it.

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  American contributions to the Sixth International Congress of Slavists, Prague, 1968, August 7–13, Vol. 1: Linguistic contributions

  • Henry Kučera, 1968, Praha> International Congress of Slavists International Congress of Slavists <6, Henry Kučera(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The morphological function of causativization consists in a regular transitivization of the underlying intransitive verb. This transitivization, taking place in a Causative, entails a characteristic transformation of the syntactic pattern connoted (implied) by the underlying intransitive verb, namely : THE GRAMMAR OF SLAVIC CausativeS 75 V intrans. V caus. i S SI SII - (SI => O x ) Explanations : SI = the grammatical subject of the basic intransitive SII = the grammatical subject of the derived Causative θ ! = the direct object of the Causative representing semantically the transform of SI (SI => Ο/). In other words, we can say that the morphological transformation of the type intransitive => Causative entails a determinate syntactic transforma-tion of the type SI => C^ conditioned by the decisive fact that the causa-tivization of an underlying intransitive verb always brings into play a new, second subject ( = agent) which relegates the first subject (that of the underlying intransitive verb) to the role of the object ( = patient) of the derived Causative verb. This addition of a new agentive subject seems to be the crucial factor in the change of the valence of a verb from primary intransitive to secondary Causative-transitive. The new agentive subject represents a new informational element which brings about a change whereby the subject of an underlying intransitive verb becomes the object of the derived Causative. The one-place valence of an underlying intran-sitive (where only a subject is admissible) is transformed into the two-place valence of the Causative (where both a subject and an object are admissible). The informational content of a Causative is richer than that of its underlying intransitive verb and can be explained only in terms of the underlying intransitive + the second agentive subject and its syntactic consequences. The transformational analysis of Causatives which we have attempted above refers to the so-called primary Causatives, i.e.

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  Causal Categories in Discourse and Cognition

  • Ted Sanders, Eve Sweetser, Ted Sanders, Eve Sweetser(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Introduction: Causality in language and cognition – what causal connectives and causal verbs reveal about the way we think Ted Sanders and Eve Sweetser 1. What language use tells us about causal categories All languages of the world provide their speakers with connectives to express causal relations in discourse – indeed, although no physicist has found “causa-tion” out in the world, all humans in all cultures seem to interpret and describe the world in terms of causal relations. As in other semantic domains, the cogni-tive scientist and the linguist are therefore interested in how much of this causal modeling is specific to a given culture and language, and how much is character-istic of general human cognition. Causal connectives and Causative auxiliaries are among the salient markers of causal construals. Speakers of English, for example, can choose between because and since or between therefore and so . How different are these from the choices made by Dutch speakers, who speak a closely related language, but (unlike English speakers) have a dedicated marker for non-volitional causality ( daardoor )? On another grammatical level, speak-ers may use causal auxiliary verbs, such as make and let to mark causal relations expressed within one clause – but how different are these from laten (related to “let” both etymologically and semantically) and doen ‘do, make’ in Dutch? It is also well known that at a young age, children learn to have very different models of human/animate volitional causation (a person throwing an object) as opposed to inanimate object causation (a branch falling from a tree) (Boyer 1996; Sperber, Premack, and Premack 1996). This could lead us to expect that cross-culturally, there will be some important contrasts between causal categories, which are part of a universal repertory potentially named by any language.

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  On Interpreting Construction Schemas

  From Action and Motion to Transitivity and Causality

  • Nicole Delbecque, Bert Cornillie(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Soft Causatives in Spanish 253 level only, a grammaticalization phenomenon following one of the tendencies suggested by Traugott (1982, 1986, 1988), where a referential element shifts from the referent in the “real world” to the dominion of the speaker. By request the hearer allows the speaker to perform some other action. Thus the speaker gets accusative marking in the main clause. The actual action is one of which the speaker is in total control. Thus the indicative form at the action level is expected. Coordination is also expected for there are two events linked by pragmatic coincidence. This explains why the causee can be overtly expressed as object and subject as in (47). To sum up, although the INDICATIVE-Causative construction is still Causative at the discourse level, it shows a high degree of independence of the caused event. This obtains as the initiative force of the causer has been drastically reduced to suspend his/her activity as requested by the speaker. The link between causal and caused event is however maintained pragmatically as the causee is equated with the speaker and the causer with the hearer. In contrast with other manifestations of dependency among events, the INDICATIVE-Causative constructions maintain the link through conversational ties. This pragmatic strategy constitutes the last and weakest possible link in the Causative chain which comes as a direct consequence of the weakening causation process that dejar ‘let’ has undergone. The behavior described for the indicative-Causative construction fully coincides with what Langacker (2000) has proposed as subjectification, a diachronical process of attenuation in degree of control exerted by an agentive subject. As attenuation takes place the notion of potency weakens and shifts from the dominion of the subject to that of the conceptualizer.

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  Questioning Causality

  Scientific Explorations of Cause and Consequence across Social Contexts

  • Rom Harré, Fathali M. Moghaddam, Rom Harré, Fathali M. Moghaddam(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  The question why there are so many human languages has over the years received a great deal of attention not just from linguists but also from philosophers, psychologists, and historians, as Steiner (1975) has shown. There is little agreement whether we are dealing with a natural or deliberately human-made phenomenon; there is also insufficient understanding of the causes of linguistic diversity. Understanding what brings languages into being, what leads to their diversification, growth, and decline, is the requisite for understanding language death and its causes. I shall employ Aristotle’s distinction between four different causes (material, formal, effective, and final), which I will use as tools to obtain answers. Let me hasten to point out that this is very much a pre-theoretical project and that I continue to struggle with the large number of parameters involved. Like philosophy, linguistics provides very little certainty and the key concepts of the title of this chapter “language” remains very much disputed.

  The material cause refers to what things are made from. In our particular case, ways of speaking and languages are not material things but processes or activities. Ways of speaking are social practices shared by a community of speakers. They are enabled both by biological factors such as the nature of the human brain or the speech tract and ear and by biological constraints on cognition. They are also sustained by cultural and historical factors: the latter are in constant flux and little can be said about the indefinitely large number of sociocultural parameters that effect ways of speaking.

  At this point it would seem to be necessary to say a few more words about the intrinsic causes of language death, that is, whether certain ways of speaking or types of languages are more prone to disappear than others. It is important to avoid crude neo-Darwinian explanations in terms of survival of the fittest as were made frequently in the context of European nationalism and colonization. Such explanations focused on structural properties rather than on patterns of language use or sociocultural factors, though the latter are better candidates when it comes to explaining why languages are no longer passed on to the next generation of speakers.

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