Sufficiency causatives
Sven Lauer, Prerna Nadathur
April 2018
 

Against past analyses, we point out that the causative verbs 'cause' and 'make' have quite different inferential profiles, and argue that this is due to the fact that they assert different kinds of basic causal relations: 'cause' asserts causal necessity, while 'make' asserts causal sufficiency. We characterize these two notions in Schulz (2011)’s structural causal models and show how the analysis not only predicts correctly when one of these two causative verbs can be truthfully applied to a situation and the other cannot, but also can derive the coercive implication associated with make when (but only when) make embeds a VP denoting a volitional action. Along the way, we show that a suitably weakened sufficiency analysis also enables a univocal analysis of the German causative verb 'lassen', which has both ‘permissive’ ('let') and ‘coercive’ ('make') readings. On our account, these different readings arise from the backgrounding of different causal factors in the evaluation of the causative claim.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/006417
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:
keywords: periphrastic causatives, cause, make, causal models, causal sufficiency, causal necessity, semantics
Downloaded:340 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]