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:
“We gave ‘em wings to fly and they rained death on us. We gave ‘em a voice to be heard around the world and they preach hatred to poison the minds of nations. Even the medicine we gave them to ease their pain is turned into a vice to enslave half mankind for the profit of a few. Ah, Janet, dear, don’t you see? Every gift that science has given them has been twisted into a thing of hate and greed.”
—Karl Brown (1897–1990)