Catalyzing causation: hindrance and sufficiency in causative "get"
Prerna Nadathur
October 2024 

This paper offers a unified approach to two "get" constructions (taking participial and nonfinite) complements in terms of indirect causal sufficiency. Both types of construction suggest that their subjects are responsible for some result described by the "get"-complement, but differ with respect to inferences of indirectness (nonfinite "get") and hindrance (participial "get"). I argue that the inferential patterns can be explained by an account on which both types of "get" predicate a relation of causal sufficiency between (some action of) its subject and the proximate (final necessary and sufficient) cause of a result state specified by the complement: the alteration between hindrance and indirectness depends on whether or not the causer of the intervening (proximate-cause) event is identified with the matrix causer. The analysis classifies "get" as a sufficiency causative (Nadathur & Lauer 2020) and explains the similarity between hindrance-"get" and the non-triviality inference associated with implicative "manage" (McIntyre 2005) by reference to a shared causal background structure (cf. Nadathur 2023b)

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008521 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of Chicago Linguistic Society 60
keywords:	causal models, sufficiency causatives, hindrance, indirectness, implicatives, semantics
Downloaded:	380 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]