Testing effects of hospitality employment on property crime in the United States

This study aims to model the effect of hospitality employment on property crime in economic crime equations, in which unemployment either indicates the opportunity cost of crime or suggests the decrease of targets. We developed a model of property crime that incorporates both unemployment rate and hospitality employment, in which the effect of unemployment rate on property crime is controlled to isolate the net effect of hospitality employment. We tested the model with the data of hospitality employment and property crime rates in the United States from 1972 to 2012, for which the date are available. On the one hand, we verified a negative causation from unemployment rate to property crime, suggesting that high unemployment rates reduce the targets of criminal activities, which in turn reduces property crime. On the other hand, by controlling for the effect of unemployment rate, we found a significantly negative causation from hospitality employment to property crime, suggesting that the decrease in property crime is due to hospitality employment that increases the opportunity cost of property crime.

Negative Causation and the Relationality of Causation

Negative causation and dispositions as mutual manifestation partners don’t threaten the relationality of causation. Separating the supervenience of truth on being from explanation and the distinctive relevance of truth-makers enables us to avoid arguments from parsimony against positive causal surrogates drawing upon the idea of truth-maker necessitation. If truth-maker necessitation were the proper characterization of how to explain the truth of all statements, and negative causal statements in particular, then a fact of totality, or the essentiality of properties of the world, would be the most parsimonious explanation of their truth albeit at the expense of identifying something that conveys their distinctive subject matter. Within the recommended framework, the existence of true negative causal statements provided motivation for recognizing the existence of positive causal surrogates as part of the explanation of their truth. The truth of negative causal statements is the basis for an argument against the truth-making picture.

Negative events in compositional semantics

Negative events have been used in analyses of various natural language phenomena such as negative perception reports and negative causation, but their conceptual and logical foundations remain ill-understood. We propose that linguistic negation denotes a function Neg, which sends any set of events P to a set Neg(P) that contains all events which preclude every event in P from being actual. An axiom ensures that any event in Neg(P) is actual if and only if no event in P is. This allows us to construe the events in Neg(P) as negative, "anti-P", events. We present a syntax-semantics interface that uses continuations to resolve scope mismatches between subject and verb phrase negation, and a fragment of English that accounts for the interaction of negation, the perception verb see, finite and nonfinite perception reports, and quantified subjects, as well as negative causation.

Contrasting the syntax and semantics of negative causation

The main objective of this study is to compare the structure of the factitive construction expressing negative causation with dejar/deixar (“to let”) in Ibero-Romance languages. It is generally accepted that Portuguese and Spanish exhibit a high degree of syntactic equivalence. However, the nature of the infinitive in the two languages is quite different, displaying more verbal characteristics in Portuguese than in Spanish. By means of a detailed empirical study, this article examines whether this structural difference has an effect on the syntax of the causatives with deixar and dejar. Indeed, statistically the selection of the different complement types (finite clause vs. infinitive, with an anteposed or postposed causee) differs substantially in the two languages. A multifactorial analysis shows to what extent the degree of dynamicity of the main constituents, namely the causer, the causee and the caused event, determine the syntactic variation in the two languages and how this variation can be linked to the different grammatical status of the infinitive.

Acusativo y dativo en la construcción factitiva

Most investigations of Romance factitive constructions study the causative verb hacer (‘to make’) and pay little attention to related verbs such as dejar (‘to let’). This article seeks to fill up this gap by contrasting the syntax of positive and negative causation, and particularly focuses on the case marking of the causee. The analysis of a Spanish corpus allows us to examine previous accounts of case marking, namely the hypothesis of incorporation and the related ‘Stratal Uniqueness Law’, and the theory of direct vs. indirect causation. The second part is dedicated to the question whether the cognitive-semantic characteristics of the causation models have any effect on its syntax. Finally, a multifactorial analysis, taking into account the degree of dynamicity of the constituents and the accusative or dative case of the causee, demonstrates that variation of pattern mainly depends on the rich polysemy of the main verbs.