Causative | EPFL Graph Search

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In linguistics, a causative (abbreviated ) is a valency-increasing operation that indicates that a subject either causes someone or something else to do or be something or causes a change in state of a non-volitional event. Normally, it brings in a new argument (the causer), A, into a transitive clause, with the original subject S becoming the object O. All languages have ways to express causation but differ in the means. Most, if not all, languages have specific or lexical causative forms (such as English rise → raise, lie → lay, sit → set). Some languages also have morphological devices (such as inflection) that change verbs into their causative forms or change adjectives into verbs of becoming. Other languages employ periphrasis, with control verbs, idiomatic expressions or auxiliary verbs. There tends to be a link between how "compact" a causative device is and its semantic meaning. The normal English causative verb or control verb used in periphrasis is make rather than cause. Linguistic terms are traditionally given names with a Romance root, which has led some to believe that cause is more prototypical. While cause is a causative, it carries some additional meaning (it implies direct causation) and is less common than make. Also, while most other English causative verbs require a to complement clause (as in "My mom caused me to eat broccoli"), make does not require one ("My mom made me eat broccoli"), at least when it is not being used in the passive voice. Many authors have written extensively on causative constructions and have used a variety of terms, often to talk about the same things. S, A, and O are terms used in morphosyntactic alignment to describe arguments in a sentence. The subject of an intransitive verb is S, the agent of a transitive verb is A, and the object of a transitive is O. These terms are technically not abbreviations (anymore) for "subject", "agent", and "object", though they can usually be thought of that way. P is often used instead of O in many works.

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