Causative - Typology

Typology

Shibatani (2001) lists three criteria for entities and relations that must be encoded in linguistic expressions of causation:

1. An agent causing or forcing another participant to perform an action, or to be in a certain condition
2. The relation between two events 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”
3. 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.