Causation in Classical Chinese During the Warring States Period and in the Han Dynasty

In this paper, I explore causation in Classical Chinese during the Warring States period and in the Han Dynasty. Whether causation is realised via causative use of words with covert causative verbs, or via overt causative verbs, causation structures can always be divided into Agentive and Causative constructions, which can be further categorised into lexical causatives and productive causatives. I also account for causation in Classical Chinese by means of Feng’s (1998, 2000, 2009) prosodic approach and show that both strategies to form causation structures are compatible with a prosodic theory. I discuss both VO and VV causation and state that Agentive and Causative constructions involving covert causative (light) verbs are prosodic words, whereas those involving overt causative verbs exhibit properties of phrases.

When Is a Causative Situation not Mapped to a Causative Construction Proper? The Case of Hupa

This work interrogates why certain real-world events that meet criteria for being considered causative events cannot be expressed using Hupa’s morphological or syntactic causative constructions, but must be encoded using one of two periphrastic constructions in which the Causer or cause is not marked as an argument. Based on fieldwork with a native speaker, I probe into these two periphrastic constructions in depth, accounting for their distributions through an appeal to Næss’s (2007) account of semantic transitivity.

Investigating Indonesian EFL learners’ knowledge and use of English causative constructions

This paper explored Indonesian EFL learners’ explicit knowledge, processing, and use of English periphrastic causative constructions make, have, and get. 20 English L1 speakers and 20 Indonesian intermediate level EFL learners majoring in English Language Education at an Indonesian university took part in this study. Data were collected through a cloze task, a sentence completion task, an interpretation task, and a set of open-ended questions asking learners to provide descriptions about their knowledge of the constructions. Results showed that learners did not always use the first noun strategy to identify the agent in a passive causative construction. Also, their suppliances of the causative verbs in most items did not significantly differ from L1 speakers. However, the syntactic patterns were mostly non-target-like. They demonstrated insufficient explicit knowledge that could enable them to verbalize the formal and functional aspects underlying the constructions. Pedagogical implications along with suggestions to improve instruction are discussed.

The Transitivity Index: Using Transitivity as a continuous measure to account for clitic case alternation in Spanish causative constructions

In Spanish causative constructions with dejar ‘let’ and hacer ‘make’ the subject of the embedded infinitive verb can appear in the accusative or the dative case. This case alternation has been accounted for by resorting to the notion of direct vs. indirect causation. Under this account, the accusative clitic with a transitive verb denotes direct causation while the dative clitic with an intransitive verb expresses indirect causation. The problem with this account is that we lack an independent definition of (in)direct causation in this context and so this approach suffers from circularity: the case of the clitic is used to determine causation type and causation type implies use of one or the other grammatical case. Therefore, a more objective way to account for clitic case alternation is needed. In this paper, I offer one possible solution in this direction by investigating clitic case alternation against Hopper and Thompson’s Transitivity parameters and a small number of other linguistic variables. The novelty of this approach is that I operationalise Transitivity as a weighted continuous measure (which I call the Transitivity Index) and use it to predict the case of the clitic. The results indicate that the transitivity of the infinitive verb, the animacy of the object and the agentivity of the subject are strong predictors of clitic case. Moreover, the Transitivity Index clearly shows that higher levels of Transitivity are associated with the dative clitic contrary to other contexts in which accusative is said to be more transitive. The findings in this paper allow us to arrive at a finer-grained characterization of the contexts in which each clitic case is more likely to occur and provide further evidence of the pervasiveness of Transitivity in natural language.

Semantically related verb verb combinations in Tibetan and Ladakhi

Tibetic languages are, from the very beginning, very rich in verb verb combinations that are not simply due to the omission of contextually given arguments. Some of these combinations have grammaticalized into temporal-modal-evidential constructions, modal verb constructions, and causative constructions. A fourth type of combination, which will be described here as ‘semantically related verb verb combinations’, is rather problematic. Formally, the first verb modifies the second verb, while semantically, one might argue that they form a compound. I will show that particularly the most frequent combinations have to be analyzed as biclausal modifying constructions, while other, less frequent constructions show a greater degree of compositionality or even grammaticalization.

Cross-linguistic influence in the second language processing of Korean morphological and syntactic causative constructions

This study investigated the effects of cross-linguistic influence in Japanese speakers’ integration of morphological and syntactic information during the processing of Korean transitive causative constructions. We examined whether Japanese speakers would process two types of Korean causative constructions as efficiently as native speakers: (a) when one target structure was instantiated differently from learners’ L1 correspondents and (b) when the other type was unique to the L2. Although the learners showed native-like performance during an acceptability judgment task, they had difficulties with the integration of morphological and syntactic information during a self-paced reading task when the target construction gave rise to cross-linguistic competitions with the L1 correspondent, but not when the target construction was unique to the L1. Our findings support the claim that cross-linguistic cue competitions are a major source of difficulties in L2 sentence processing.