Causative
Encyclopedia
In linguistics, a causative (abbreviated ) is a form that indicates that a subject causes someone or something else to do or be something, or causes a change in state of a non-volitional
event.
All languages have ways to express causation, but differ in the means. Some languages have morphological
devices (such as inflection
) that change verbs into their causative forms, or adjectives into verbs of becoming. Other languages employ periphrasis
, with idiomatic expressions or auxiliary verb
s. All languages also have lexical causative forms (such as English rise → raise).
This set of definitional prerequisites allows for a broad set of types of relationships based, at least, on the lexical verb, the semantics of the causer, the semantics of the causee and the semantics of the construction explicitly encoding the causal relationship. Many analysts (Comrie (1981), Song (1996), Dixon (2000) and others) have worked to tease apart what factors (semantic or otherwise) account for the distribution of causative constructions, as well as to document what patterns actually occur cross-linguistically.
Comrie’s work is also noteworthy for having brought the notion of syntactic hierarchy to bear on the typology of causative constructions. A hierarchy of grammatical relations had already been formulated to help explain possibilities for relative clause formation (first presented as Keenan and Comrie’s (1972) NP accessibility hierarchy; see Croft 1990: 147), and Comrie argued that a similar hierarchy was in play, at least in some constructions, in the marking of the original A argument when a base transitive clause is causativized. The hierarchy is as follows:
Comrie’s argument was, in short, that some causativized-transitive constructions mark the new A as belonging to the leftmost available slot in the above hierarchy. Dixon (2000) fleshes out a version this analysis in more detail.
Song employs the following terminology:
The major differences between Song’s analysis and Comrie (1981) and Dixon (2000), is that Song lumps the range of lexical and morphological causatives together under the label COMPACT (20), in which [Vcause] can be “less than a free morpheme” (e.g., bound morpheme [prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, reduplication], zero-derivation, suppletion); or “a free morpheme” (28), in which [Vcause] and [Veffect] form a single grammatical unit. I note that most of the examples given look like serial verb constructions, and no in-depth analysis is undertaken for some of the constructions in which [Vcause] and [Veffect] are less formally contiguous. Song notes this non-contiguity, but does not undertake to explain why it might be important.
The AND causative, for Song, is any construction with a separate [Scause] and [Seffect] i.e., in which “two clauses [are] involved” (35). This, in theory could include larger, multi-clausal expressions of causal relations which many analysts probably would not label a ‘causative construction’, e.g.: ‘It rained yesterday, so they stayed home,’ but the boundaries of the AND causative category are not discussed.
One of Song’s major contributions to the literature is fleshing out an analysis of his PURP causative. These are constructions which encode intended causation on the part of the causer, but which do not encode any outcome: i.e., the speaker encodes [Vcause] and causer intentionality, but remains agnostic as to whether [Veffect] was felicitously effected.
Dixon (2000), in his authoritative typology of causatives, discusses the syntax and semantics of all types of causative constructions, in much more detail than can be recounted here. One research question he begins to tackle is the following: Many languages, as he and many others have documented and attempted to categorize, have at least two causative constructions. Leaving aside for now the issue of lexical causatives (except where zero-derivation has been demonstrated to be a productive morphological process), these are often broadly divided into ‘more compact’ and ‘less compact’, with labels, differing by analyst, indicative of relative length of the forms in question (e.g., Comrie’s straightforward ‘morphological’/’syntactic’, or Song’s (1996) ‘COMPACT’/’AND’). Earlier works had attempted to summarize the semantic differences under the vague (though preliminarily useful) rubric of the “Iconicity Principle” (see Huang and Su (2005) for a succinct discussion), which basically posits a correlation between the degree of formal compactness of the linguistic material encoding the causative macroevent and the perceived directness of the relationship between causing event ([Vcause]) and caused event ([Veffect]): i.e., shorter forms, on the whole, were posited to encode more direct causation than longer forms, as in the classic English I killed him. [direct causation] vs. I caused him to die.[less direct causation] examples.
The Iconicity Principle is a good first step, but does not really explain any fine-grained semantic distinctions that may be in play. The first attempt to take the analysis further, to my knowledge, was Comrie’s (1981:164-7) discussion of directness and control, which began looking at the semantics of the causer and causee as possible semantic factors influencing the distribution of different causative constructions. Dixon (2000), however, goes several steps further, identifying and fleshing out a system of 9 scalar parameters along which causative constructions tend to vary, supported by data from his typological survey. These are as follows:
This set of parameters is useful in and of itself, but, importantly, Dixon applies it to all causative constructions in a sample of over 25 languages, and notes that more formally compact causative constructions prototypically tend toward the following values on the above 9 criteria:
Causer acts naturally [8], intentionally [7] and directly [6]; the causee either lacks control [3] or has control but is willing [3 & 4], and is only partially affected [5]. May apply only to active intransitive verbs [or may include some small subclass or transitives] [1 & 2], or to state verbs alone [1]. (Summarized from Dixon (2001:77).)
Dixon thus provides a data-driven account of the prototypical ‘more compact’ and ‘less compact’ causatives (though noting that these prototypes are somewhat artificial, chiefly in that many causative constructions in the languages surveyed involve only some subset of the criteria above), and calls for broader typological surveys to test his model—a call which I have taken into account when selecting the languages for my preliminary survey. One ongoing research goal in this dissertation tests these parameters against this new set of languages: further below, I present a survey of causative constructions from my database, along with notes on which of Dixon’s criteria seem to be at play.
As for the syntax of causatives, Dixon notes that for causativized intransitives, the overwhelming tendency is for the old S argument to be marked as O, with the introduced argument functioning as the new A. Somewhat more interestingly, Dixon posits six typological classes based on how languages (constructions?) treat arguments after a new argument has been introduced via the causativization of a base transitive verb.
One question remaining to be explored is how this set of divisions usefully differs from other analysts’ typologies of the semantics of encoding causal relations. Some overlap in the types of semantic information in play is immediately apparent, however: in cases of instrument causation (‘the hammer broke the cup’), we would certainly expect the ‘causer’ to be acting directly [Dixon’s criterion 6] and to be involved in the activity [criterion 9]; likewise, we would expect instances of caused agency to include more information on causee control on willingness [criteria 3 & 4].
In what can be seen as a re-characterization of Dixon’s (2000) criteria (2; transitive/intransitive/ditrasitive), (6; ‘directness of causer action’) and (8; ‘causer effort’), Shibatani argues that this hierarchy of susceptibility to causativization can be characterized in terms of the semantic role of the causer, which he characterizes, in turn, in terms of the difficulty the causer experiences in bringing about the caused event. He argues [in terms reminiscent of Talmy’s (2003) force dynamics] that a patientive causee [S, who prototypically is reassigned to O] poses less resistance than an agentive causee; in the former case, the only counterforce to overcome is the causee’s inertia, either in continuing to be at rest or in continuing to undergo a change. In the latter case (some kind of caused agency), however, causation requires the participation of another entity: in force-dynamic terms, the potential resistance is greater [and, causer control over the realization of [Veffect] is lower], hence the hierarchy:
, there is a causative form of the verb (n.ijanta), which is used when the subject
of a clause forces or makes the object
perform an action. The causative suffix
-ay is attached to the verbal root (this may cause vowel sandhi
to take place).
voicing applied. (All of these characteristics derive from the way that causative verbs are formed in Proto-Indo-European
, with an accented -éy- suffix added to the o-grade of a non-derived verb.) Examples:
In English, to sit / to seat : to settle, and in German,
sitzen/setzen : stehen/stellen form pairs of causatives/resultatives.
, causative form of the verb is made by adding ân(i)dan to the present stem:
* *iacio "to lay down" vs. *iaceo "to throw"
* *sedeo "to sit" → *sīdō, "to settle", from an older meaning "to put down"
there is a causative form of the verb. It is postulated that in Proto-Semitic
the causative verbal stem was formed by the š- prefix, and this has become ''ʾa-, hi- or ī- in different languages.
Arabic also has a causative form (Form II) created by gemination
of the central consonant of the triliteral root, as follows:
The ''ʾa- form (Form IV), while used in Modern Standard Arabic, is no longer productive in many of the colloquial varieties of Arabic
, which uniformly prefer Form II.
there is a similar causative/obligative inflection:
of Europe, such as Finnish
.
Notice that the causative suffix is often used irregularly and/or because of historical reasons, e.g. Finnish:
language of New Zealand
, the whaka- prefix can be added to a verb, for example:
such as Tagalog
and Ilokano
, the pa- prefix is added to verbal forms and to adjectives to form causatives.
, an Amerindian language, the mbo- prefix is added to oral verbs, and mo- to nasal verbs:
has a well-developed morphological system of expressing causation by means of the suffix -tia:
The semantic factor of causee control; that is, the degree of control that that causee wields over the effecting of the caused microevent (also discussed as parameter #3 on Dixon’s (2000:62) list), and which Rice (2001) finds to be a major factor in other Athabaskan causatives, helps account for quite a bit of the distribution of the Hupa syntactic causative (below).
(summarized in Sapir and Golla (2001)), describes three classes of morphologically-derived causatives:
While Golla does not generalize about the semantics of verb themes that are compatible with causative ƚ-, several preliminary generalizations can be made. First of all, in the three cases described by Golla, O [the undergoer] is neither controlling nor agentive; O is largely patientive in all cases. Second, the causer appears to be acting directly on O. Third, none of the examples given (including the examples above, of course) involve the causativization of a base-transitive theme.
, nor in any of the major European languages, which resort to idiomatic uses of certain verbs like English make or have, French
faire or laisser, or German
lassen. For example:
Note that this type of structure is more complicated than the inflectional causative form exemplified in Sanskrit, since it has two verbs and three arguments: the first is the subject of the first verb; the second is the object of the first verb but also the subject of the second; and the third is the object of the second verb. These arguments can be exchanged using passive voice
(in either verb), but the result can be cumbersome or even ungrammatical.
Other complex constructions include the use of subjunctive forms. Spanish
uses these often, since it does not allow some simpler constructions that English permits.
In the Romance languages, a number of verbs alternate between intransitive (semantically middle voice) and causative transitive, using a pseudo-reflexive clitic
pronoun
:
In Japanese
, there are a large number of verbs that alternate in various semi-regular patterns between intransitive forms and causative transitive forms, for example:
For the purpose of syntax, a derivation
that turns an adjective or noun into a "verb of becoming" works the same as a causative construction for intransitive verbs. For example, in English the derivational suffixes -(i)fy can be thought of as a causative:
, then the causative construction as a whole is transitive
: to fall → to make (sbdy./sth.) fall, to topple (sbdy./sth.), or indeed, to fell, a fossilised form from when causatives were an inflexional part of English grammar. If the original verb is transitive, the causative is ditransitive
: to eat (sth.) → to make (sbdy.) eat (sth.), to feed (sth.) to (sbdy.).
of a transitive verb to an actor argument. When the causative voice is applied to a verb, its valency
increases by one. If, after the application of the grammatical voice, there are two actor arguments, one of them is obligatorily demoted to an oblique argument.
Japanese
and Mongolian
are examples of languages with the causative voice. The following are examples from Japanese:
Volition (linguistics)
In linguistics, volition refers to a distinction that is made in some languages' verb conjugations or case assignment to express whether the subject intended the action or not, or whether it was done voluntarily or accidentally....
event.
All languages have ways to express causation, but differ in the means. Some languages have morphological
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
devices (such as inflection
Inflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
) that change verbs into their causative forms, or adjectives into verbs of becoming. Other languages employ periphrasis
Periphrasis
In linguistics, periphrasis is a device by which a grammatical category or grammatical relationship is expressed by a free morpheme , instead of being shown by inflection or derivation...
, with idiomatic expressions or auxiliary verb
Auxiliary verb
In linguistics, an auxiliary verb is a verb that gives further semantic or syntactic information about a main or full verb. In English, the extra meaning provided by an auxiliary verb alters the basic meaning of the main verb to make it have one or more of the following functions: passive voice,...
s. All languages also have lexical causative forms (such as English rise → raise).
Typology
Shibatani (2001) lists three criteria for entities and relations that must be encoded in linguistic expressions of causation:- An agent causing or forcing another participant to perform an action, or to be in a certain condition
- The relation between [the] two events [=the causing event, and the caused performing/being event] is such that the speaker believes that the occurrence of one event, the ‟caused event,” has been realized at t2, which is after t1, the time of the ‟causing event”
- The relation between causing event and caused event is such that the speaker believes the occurrence of the caused event depends wholly on the occurrence of the causing event—the dependency of the two events here must be to the extent that it allows the speaker a counterfactual inference that the caused event would not have taken place at a particular time if the causing event had not taken place, provided that all else had remained the same. (1976a: 1-2)
This set of definitional prerequisites allows for a broad set of types of relationships based, at least, on the lexical verb, the semantics of the causer, the semantics of the causee and the semantics of the construction explicitly encoding the causal relationship. Many analysts (Comrie (1981), Song (1996), Dixon (2000) and others) have worked to tease apart what factors (semantic or otherwise) account for the distribution of causative constructions, as well as to document what patterns actually occur cross-linguistically.
Comrie
Comrie (1981: 158-177) focuses on the typology of the syntax and semantics of causative constructions proper. Crucially, Comrie (and others to be discussed here) distinguish between the linguistic encoding of causal relations and other, extra-linguistic concerns, such as the nature of causation itself, and questions of how humans perceive of causal relations. While certainly not irrelevant, these extra-linguistic questions will, for now, be left aside. Comrie usefully characterizes causative events in terms of two (or more) microevents perceived of composing a macroevent, and encoded in a single expression (of varying size and form). Formally, he categorizes causatives into 3 types, depending on the contiguity of the material encoding the causing event and that encoding the caused event. These are: 1) lexical causatives, in which the two events are expressed in a single lexical item, as in the well-discussed case of English kill; 2) morphological causatives, in which the causing event and the caused event are encoded in a single verbal complex via causative morphology, and, prototypically, morphological marking showing the status of affected arguments. Finally, Comrie discusses analytic causatives, in which the causing event and the caused event are encoded in separate clauses.Comrie’s work is also noteworthy for having brought the notion of syntactic hierarchy to bear on the typology of causative constructions. A hierarchy of grammatical relations had already been formulated to help explain possibilities for relative clause formation (first presented as Keenan and Comrie’s (1972) NP accessibility hierarchy; see Croft 1990: 147), and Comrie argued that a similar hierarchy was in play, at least in some constructions, in the marking of the original A argument when a base transitive clause is causativized. The hierarchy is as follows:
- subject > direct object > indirect object > oblique > genitive
Comrie’s argument was, in short, that some causativized-transitive constructions mark the new A as belonging to the leftmost available slot in the above hierarchy. Dixon (2000) fleshes out a version this analysis in more detail.
Song
Presenting a typology of causatives and causation based on a database of a staggering 600 languages, Song (1996) is very critical of typological work that depends on statistical inference, citing data from the Niger-Congo family that contradicts some earlier claims that “languages within genera are generally fairly similar typologically” (Dryer 1989: 267)(19) Song therefore culls data from every language for which adequate documentation was available to him, and categorizes the various causative constructions gleaned therefrom into 3 classes: COMPACT, AND and PURP.Song employs the following terminology:
- [Scause] – the clause which denotes a causing event
- [Seffect] – the clause which denotes the caused event
- [Vcause] – verbal elements of [Scause]
- [Veffect]- verbal elements of [Veffect] (20)
The major differences between Song’s analysis and Comrie (1981) and Dixon (2000), is that Song lumps the range of lexical and morphological causatives together under the label COMPACT (20), in which [Vcause] can be “less than a free morpheme” (e.g., bound morpheme [prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, reduplication], zero-derivation, suppletion); or “a free morpheme” (28), in which [Vcause] and [Veffect] form a single grammatical unit. I note that most of the examples given look like serial verb constructions, and no in-depth analysis is undertaken for some of the constructions in which [Vcause] and [Veffect] are less formally contiguous. Song notes this non-contiguity, but does not undertake to explain why it might be important.
The AND causative, for Song, is any construction with a separate [Scause] and [Seffect] i.e., in which “two clauses [are] involved” (35). This, in theory could include larger, multi-clausal expressions of causal relations which many analysts probably would not label a ‘causative construction’, e.g.: ‘It rained yesterday, so they stayed home,’ but the boundaries of the AND causative category are not discussed.
One of Song’s major contributions to the literature is fleshing out an analysis of his PURP causative. These are constructions which encode intended causation on the part of the causer, but which do not encode any outcome: i.e., the speaker encodes [Vcause] and causer intentionality, but remains agnostic as to whether [Veffect] was felicitously effected.
Dixon
Dixon (2000), in his authoritative typology of causatives, discusses the syntax and semantics of all types of causative constructions, in much more detail than can be recounted here. One research question he begins to tackle is the following: Many languages, as he and many others have documented and attempted to categorize, have at least two causative constructions. Leaving aside for now the issue of lexical causatives (except where zero-derivation has been demonstrated to be a productive morphological process), these are often broadly divided into ‘more compact’ and ‘less compact’, with labels, differing by analyst, indicative of relative length of the forms in question (e.g., Comrie’s straightforward ‘morphological’/’syntactic’, or Song’s (1996) ‘COMPACT’/’AND’). Earlier works had attempted to summarize the semantic differences under the vague (though preliminarily useful) rubric of the “Iconicity Principle” (see Huang and Su (2005) for a succinct discussion), which basically posits a correlation between the degree of formal compactness of the linguistic material encoding the causative macroevent and the perceived directness of the relationship between causing event ([Vcause]) and caused event ([Veffect]): i.e., shorter forms, on the whole, were posited to encode more direct causation than longer forms, as in the classic English I killed him. [direct causation] vs. I caused him to die.[less direct causation] examples.
The Iconicity Principle is a good first step, but does not really explain any fine-grained semantic distinctions that may be in play. The first attempt to take the analysis further, to my knowledge, was Comrie’s (1981:164-7) discussion of directness and control, which began looking at the semantics of the causer and causee as possible semantic factors influencing the distribution of different causative constructions. Dixon (2000), however, goes several steps further, identifying and fleshing out a system of 9 scalar parameters along which causative constructions tend to vary, supported by data from his typological survey. These are as follows:
- Relating to the lexical verb involved in the construction:
- 1. stative vs. active
- 2. intransitive vs. transitive vs. ditransitive
- Relating to the causee:
- 3. having vs. lacking control [over the caused microevent]
- 4. acting willingly vs. unwillingly
- 5. partially affected vs. completely affected
- Relating to the causer:
- 6. acting directly vs. indirectly
- 7. acting accidentally vs. intentionally
- 8. acting naturally vs. with effort [i.e., initiation of the caused microevent takes less or more effort]
- 9. involved vs. not involved in the activity [=the caused microevent]
This set of parameters is useful in and of itself, but, importantly, Dixon applies it to all causative constructions in a sample of over 25 languages, and notes that more formally compact causative constructions prototypically tend toward the following values on the above 9 criteria:
Causer acts naturally [8], intentionally [7] and directly [6]; the causee either lacks control [3] or has control but is willing [3 & 4], and is only partially affected [5]. May apply only to active intransitive verbs [or may include some small subclass or transitives] [1 & 2], or to state verbs alone [1]. (Summarized from Dixon (2001:77).)
Dixon thus provides a data-driven account of the prototypical ‘more compact’ and ‘less compact’ causatives (though noting that these prototypes are somewhat artificial, chiefly in that many causative constructions in the languages surveyed involve only some subset of the criteria above), and calls for broader typological surveys to test his model—a call which I have taken into account when selecting the languages for my preliminary survey. One ongoing research goal in this dissertation tests these parameters against this new set of languages: further below, I present a survey of causative constructions from my database, along with notes on which of Dixon’s criteria seem to be at play.
As for the syntax of causatives, Dixon notes that for causativized intransitives, the overwhelming tendency is for the old S argument to be marked as O, with the introduced argument functioning as the new A. Somewhat more interestingly, Dixon posits six typological classes based on how languages (constructions?) treat arguments after a new argument has been introduced via the causativization of a base transitive verb.
Talmy
Talmy (2003 v.2: 67-101) contains an in-depth investigation of different types of causal relations. Talmy refers to these as “lexicalization patterns,” a term which remains unclear to me, given that few of the examples given in his discussion are lexical items, and most interpretations of “different types of causation incorporated in the verb root” are in fact wholly dependent on other morphosyntactic material in the clause. Let us first examine his list of possible (semantic) causative types (69-70), with examples:- autonomous events (non-causative) The vase broke.
- resulting-event causation The vase broke from a ball’s rolling into it.
- causing-event causation A ball’s rolling into it broke the vase.
- instrument causation A ball broke the vase.
- author causation (unintended) I broke the vase in rolling a ball into it.
- agent causation (intended) I broke the vase by rolling a ball into it.
- undergoer situation (non-causative) My arm broke (on me) when I fell.
- self-agentive causation I walked to the store.
- caused agency (inductive causation) I sent him to the store.
One question remaining to be explored is how this set of divisions usefully differs from other analysts’ typologies of the semantics of encoding causal relations. Some overlap in the types of semantic information in play is immediately apparent, however: in cases of instrument causation (‘the hammer broke the cup’), we would certainly expect the ‘causer’ to be acting directly [Dixon’s criterion 6] and to be involved in the activity [criterion 9]; likewise, we would expect instances of caused agency to include more information on causee control on willingness [criteria 3 & 4].
Susceptibility to causativization
Shibatani (2001) classifies verbs into four categories, according to how susceptible they are to morphological causativization:- Inactive intransitives [=unaccusatives], e.g., 'faint'
- Middle/ingestive verbs, e.g., 'eat'
- Active intransitives [=unergatives], e.g., 'work'
- Transitive verbs, e.g., 'carry'
In what can be seen as a re-characterization of Dixon’s (2000) criteria (2; transitive/intransitive/ditrasitive), (6; ‘directness of causer action’) and (8; ‘causer effort’), Shibatani argues that this hierarchy of susceptibility to causativization can be characterized in terms of the semantic role of the causer, which he characterizes, in turn, in terms of the difficulty the causer experiences in bringing about the caused event. He argues [in terms reminiscent of Talmy’s (2003) force dynamics] that a patientive causee [S, who prototypically is reassigned to O] poses less resistance than an agentive causee; in the former case, the only counterforce to overcome is the causee’s inertia, either in continuing to be at rest or in continuing to undergo a change. In the latter case (some kind of caused agency), however, causation requires the participation of another entity: in force-dynamic terms, the potential resistance is greater [and, causer control over the realization of [Veffect] is lower], hence the hierarchy:
- inactive intransitives > active intransitives > transitives.
Sanskrit
In SanskritSanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
, there is a causative form of the verb (n.ijanta), which is used when the subject
Subject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
of a clause forces or makes the object
Object (grammar)
An object in grammar is part of a sentence, and often part of the predicate. It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb. Basically, it is what or whom the verb is acting upon...
perform an action. The causative suffix
Affix
An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...
-ay is attached to the verbal root (this may cause vowel sandhi
Sandhi
Sandhi is a cover term for a wide variety of phonological processes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries . Examples include the fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of sounds due to neighboring sounds or due to the grammatical function of adjacent words...
to take place).
- bhū "to be, exist" → bhāv-ay; e. g. bhāvayati "he causes to be"
- khad "to eat" → khād-ay; e. g. khādayāmi "I cause to eat" = "I feed"
Proto-Germanic
In Proto-Germanic, the parent language of the Germanic dialects including English, causative verbs are formed by adding a suffix -j/ij- to the past-tense ablaut of a strong verb, with Verner's LawVerner's law
Verner's law, stated by Karl Verner in 1875, describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z,...
voicing applied. (All of these characteristics derive from the way that causative verbs are formed in Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
, with an accented -éy- suffix added to the o-grade of a non-derived verb.) Examples:
- *rīsanaN (I) "to rise" → *raizijanaN "to raise", i.e. "to cause to rise"
- *frawerþanaN (III) "to perish" → *frawardijanaN "to destroy", i.e. "to cause to perish"
- *nesanaN (V) "to survive" → *nazjanaN "to save", i.e. "to cause to survive"
- *ligjanaN (V) "to lie down" → *lagjanaN "to lay", i.e. "to cause to lie down"
- *grētanaN (VII) "to weep" → *grōtijanaN "to cause to weep"
In English, to sit / to seat : to settle, and in German,
sitzen/setzen : stehen/stellen form pairs of causatives/resultatives.
Persian
In PersianPersian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
, causative form of the verb is made by adding ân(i)dan to the present stem:
- xordan (to eat) → xor (present stem) → xorândan (to cause/make to eat)
- xandidan (to laugh) → xand (present stem) → xandândan (to cause/make to laugh)
Latin
Latin has inherited a few Indo-European causatives.* *iacio "to lay down" vs. *iaceo "to throw"
* *sedeo "to sit" → *sīdō, "to settle", from an older meaning "to put down"
Urdu
Urdu uses the infix "-(l)ā-" and -(l)vā-" to render verbs causative.Semitic
In most Semitic languagesSemitic languages
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...
there is a causative form of the verb. It is postulated that in Proto-Semitic
Proto-Semitic language
Proto-Semitic is the hypothetical proto-language ancestral to historical Semitic languages of the Middle East. Locations which have been proposed for its origination include northern Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Levant with a 2009 study proposing that it may have originated around...
the causative verbal stem was formed by the š- prefix, and this has become ''ʾa-, hi- or ī- in different languages.
- SyriacSyriac languageSyriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Having first appeared as a script in the 1st century AD after being spoken as an unwritten language for five centuries, Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from...
: kəθav "he wrote" → ''ʾaxtev "he composed" - ArabicArabic languageArabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
: ''ʿalima "he knew" → ''ʾaʿlama "he informed" - HebrewHebrew languageHebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
: tsaxak "he laughed" → hitsxik "he made sb. laugh"
Arabic also has a causative form (Form II) created by gemination
Gemination
In phonetics, gemination happens when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant. Gemination is distinct from stress and may appear independently of it....
of the central consonant of the triliteral root, as follows:
- ''ʿalima "he knew" → ''ʿallama "he taught"
The ''ʾa- form (Form IV), while used in Modern Standard Arabic, is no longer productive in many of the colloquial varieties of Arabic
Varieties of Arabic
The Arabic language is a Semitic language characterized by a wide number of linguistic varieties within its five regional forms. The largest divisions occur between the spoken languages of different regions. The Arabic of North Africa, for example, is often incomprehensible to an Arabic speaker...
, which uniformly prefer Form II.
Japanese
In JapaneseJapanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
there is a similar causative/obligative inflection:
- 食べる taberu "to eat" → tabesaseru "to make to eat, to feed"
- 読む yomu "to read" → yomaseru "to make to read"
Khmer
Khmer has six prefixes and one infix to derive the causative form of verbs, although they vary in frequency and productiveness. The consonantal prefix p- is one of these affixes.- coap "joined" → pcoap "to join"
- cum "around" → pcum "to gather"
Finnish
Causative forms are also found in the Uralic languagesUralic languages
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
of Europe, such as Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
.
- syödä "to eat" → syöttää "to feed"
- täysi "full" → täyttää "to fill"
- haihtua "to evaporate" → haihduttaa "to vaporize"
Notice that the causative suffix is often used irregularly and/or because of historical reasons, e.g. Finnish:
- olla "to be" → olettaa "to assume", not "to make exist"
- kirja- ancient "patterns (of embroidery or text)", but modern "book" → kirjoittaa "to write" ("transform into patterns of text"), not "to transform into books"
Maori
In the MāoriMaori language
Māori or te reo Māori , commonly te reo , is the language of the indigenous population of New Zealand, the Māori. It has the status of an official language in New Zealand...
language of New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
, the whaka- prefix can be added to a verb, for example:
- ako "to learn" becomes whakaako "to teach" (to cause to learn)
Philippine languages
In Philippine languagesPhilippine languages
The Philippine languages are a 1991 proposal by Robert Blust that all the languages of the Philippines and northern Sulawesi—except Sama–Bajaw and a few languages of Palawan—form a subfamily of Austronesian languages...
such as Tagalog
Tagalog language
Tagalog is an Austronesian language spoken as a first language by a third of the population of the Philippines and as a second language by most of the rest. It is the first language of the Philippine region IV and of Metro Manila...
and Ilokano
Ilokano language
Ilokano or Ilocano is the third most-spoken language of the Republic of the Philippines....
, the pa- prefix is added to verbal forms and to adjectives to form causatives.
- dakkel "big (adj)" → padakkelen "to enlarge" (Ilokano)
- kain "eat" → pakainin "to make eat, to feed" (Tagalog)
Guaraní
In GuaraníGuaraní language
Guaraní, specifically the primary variety known as Paraguayan Guaraní , is an indigenous language of South America that belongs to the Tupí–Guaraní subfamily of the Tupian languages. It is one of the official languages of Paraguay , where it is spoken by the majority of the population, and half of...
, an Amerindian language, the mbo- prefix is added to oral verbs, and mo- to nasal verbs:
- puka "to laugh" → mbopuka "to make (someone) laugh"
- guata "to walk" → mboguata "to guide"
- pu'ã "to go up" → mopu'ã "to elevate"
Uto-Aztecan
Classical NahuatlClassical Nahuatl
Classical Nahuatl is a term used to describe the variants of the Nahuatl language that were spoken in the Valley of Mexico — and central Mexico as a lingua franca — at the time of the 16th-century Spanish conquest of Mexico...
has a well-developed morphological system of expressing causation by means of the suffix -tia:
- cua "he eats" → quicualtia "he feeds him" (the causative makes the intransitive verbIntransitive verbIn grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb that has no object. This differs from a transitive verb, which takes one or more objects. Both classes of verb are related to the concept of the transitivity of a verb....
eat into the transitive verbTransitive verbIn syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more objects. The term is used to contrast intransitive verbs, which do not have objects.-Examples:Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs:...
feed, requiring a pronominalPronounIn linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
prefix, in this case qui- "him") - calli "it is a house" → caltia "he built a house" (i.e. "he caused it to become a house")
Athabaskan
Rice (2000) makes the following points about morphological causatives in Athabaskan:The semantic factor of causee control; that is, the degree of control that that causee wields over the effecting of the caused microevent (also discussed as parameter #3 on Dixon’s (2000:62) list), and which Rice (2001) finds to be a major factor in other Athabaskan causatives, helps account for quite a bit of the distribution of the Hupa syntactic causative (below).
Hupa
Golla, in his (1970) descriptive grammar of HupaHupa
Hupa, also spelled Hoopa, are a Native American tribe in northwestern California. Their autonym is Natinixwe, also spelled Natinookwa, meaning "People of the Place Where the Trails Return." The majority of the tribe is enrolled in the federally recognized Hoopa Valley Tribe; however, some Hupa are...
(summarized in Sapir and Golla (2001)), describes three classes of morphologically-derived causatives:
While Golla does not generalize about the semantics of verb themes that are compatible with causative ƚ-, several preliminary generalizations can be made. First of all, in the three cases described by Golla, O [the undergoer] is neither controlling nor agentive; O is largely patientive in all cases. Second, the causer appears to be acting directly on O. Third, none of the examples given (including the examples above, of course) involve the causativization of a base-transitive theme.
Periphrastic constructions
There are no regular causative inflections in EnglishEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, nor in any of the major European languages, which resort to idiomatic uses of certain verbs like English make or have, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
faire or laisser, or German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
lassen. For example:
- She made me eat the vegetables.
- I had John build the house.
- I had the posters taken down.
Note that this type of structure is more complicated than the inflectional causative form exemplified in Sanskrit, since it has two verbs and three arguments: the first is the subject of the first verb; the second is the object of the first verb but also the subject of the second; and the third is the object of the second verb. These arguments can be exchanged using passive voice
Passive voice
Passive voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. Passive is used in a clause whose subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb. That is, the subject undergoes an action or has its state changed. A sentence whose theme is marked as grammatical subject is...
(in either verb), but the result can be cumbersome or even ungrammatical.
Other complex constructions include the use of subjunctive forms. Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
uses these often, since it does not allow some simpler constructions that English permits.
- Él hizo que la siguieran. "He had her followed.", lit. "He had (things done so) that they would follow her."
- Hicimos que el perro comiera pescado. "We made the dog eat fish.", lit. "We did (things so) the dog would eat fish."
In the Romance languages, a number of verbs alternate between intransitive (semantically middle voice) and causative transitive, using a pseudo-reflexive clitic
Clitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level...
pronoun
Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
:
- Ella se despierta a las 7. "She wakes up at 7."
- Ella despierta a los niños. "She wakes up the children."
Lexical
In many cases, a language simply uses a different lexical item to indicate a causative form. For example, the causative of English rise is rear, and the causative of eat is feed. English allows a notable freedom in verb valency, resulting in verbs like break, burn or awake, which may be causative or not (he burns it = he causes it to burn). Causativeness is therefore zero-marked in many English verbs.In Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, there are a large number of verbs that alternate in various semi-regular patterns between intransitive forms and causative transitive forms, for example:
- agaru "to go up, to rise" → ageru "to raise"
- magaru "to turn" → mageru "to bend"
- kowareru "to be broken" → kowasu "to (cause to) break"
- kaeru "to go back" → kaesu "to send back"
For the purpose of syntax, a derivation
Derivation
Derivation may refer to:* Derivation , a function on an algebra which generalizes certain features of the derivative operator* Derivation * Derivation in differential algebra, a unary function satisfying the Leibniz product law...
that turns an adjective or noun into a "verb of becoming" works the same as a causative construction for intransitive verbs. For example, in English the derivational suffixes -(i)fy can be thought of as a causative:
- simple → simplify = "to make simple", "to cause (sthg.) to become simple"
- object → objectify = "to make into an object", "to cause (sthg.) to become an object" (figuratively, that is)
Changes of state
In languages with stative verbs (equivalent to English adjectives), the acquisition of a quality, or changes of state, can be expressed with causatives in the same way as with regular verbs. For example, if there is a stative verb to be large, the causative will simply mean to enlarge, to make grow. The reflexive form of this causative can then be used to mean to enlarge oneself, or even as a middle voice, to grow.Syntactic causative constructions
A causative form or phrase can be thought of as a valency-increasing voice operation, which adds one argument. If the original verb is intransitiveIntransitive verb
In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb that has no object. This differs from a transitive verb, which takes one or more objects. Both classes of verb are related to the concept of the transitivity of a verb....
, then the causative construction as a whole is transitive
Transitive verb
In syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more objects. The term is used to contrast intransitive verbs, which do not have objects.-Examples:Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs:...
: to fall → to make (sbdy./sth.) fall, to topple (sbdy./sth.), or indeed, to fell, a fossilised form from when causatives were an inflexional part of English grammar. If the original verb is transitive, the causative is ditransitive
Ditransitive verb
In grammar, a ditransitive verb is a verb which takes a subject and two objects which refer to a recipient and a theme. According to certain linguistics considerations, these objects may be called direct and indirect, or primary and secondary...
: to eat (sth.) → to make (sbdy.) eat (sth.), to feed (sth.) to (sbdy.).
Causative voice
The causative voice is a grammatical voice promoting the oblique argumentVerb argument
In linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntactic relationship with the verb in a clause. In English, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object....
of a transitive verb to an actor argument. When the causative voice is applied to a verb, its valency
Valency (linguistics)
In linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the number of arguments controlled by a verbal predicate. It is related, though not identical, to verb transitivity, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate...
increases by one. If, after the application of the grammatical voice, there are two actor arguments, one of them is obligatorily demoted to an oblique argument.
Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
and Mongolian
Mongolian language
The Mongolian language is the official language of Mongolia and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner...
are examples of languages with the causative voice. The following are examples from Japanese:
| Tanaka-kun | ga | atsume-ru |
| Tanaka | nom Nominative case The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments... |
collect-pres Present tense The present tense is a grammatical tense that locates a situation or event in present time. This linguistic definition refers to a concept that indicates a feature of the meaning of a verb... |
| Tanaka collects them. | ||
| Causative | ||
|---|---|---|
| Tanaka-kun | ni | atsume-sase-yō |
| Tanaka | dat Dative case The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink".... |
collect-caus-cohort |
| Let's get Tanaka to collect them. | ||
| kodomo | ga | hon | o | yom-u |
| children | nom | book | acc Accusative case The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions... |
read-pres |
| Children read books. | ||||
| Causative | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| kodomo | ni | hon | o | yom-aseru |
| children | dat | book | acc | read-caus-pres |
| (They) make children read books. | ||||