The causative voice is a grammatical voice promoting the oblique argument 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:
| Tanaka-kun | ga | atsume-ru |
| Tanaka | nom | collect-pres |
| Tanaka collects them. | ||
| Causative | ||
|---|---|---|
| Tanaka-kun | ni | atsume-sase-yō |
| Tanaka | dat | collect-caus-cohort |
| Let's get Tanaka to collect them. | ||
| kodomo | ga | hon | o | yom-u |
| children | nom | book | acc | read-pres |
| Children read books. | ||||
| Causative | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| kodomo | ni | hon | o | yom-aseru |
| children | dat | book | acc | read-caus-pres |
| (They) make children read books. | ||||
Read more about this topic: Causative
Famous quotes containing the word voice:
“The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.”
—Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)