[Lingtyp] A generalization about morphological and syntactic causatives

Thu Jun 8 19:14:54 UTC 2023

Thanks, Christian! I was struck by the absence of syntactic causative constructions in some languages. Until I came across the first such example (Japanese, decades ago), I had naively assumed that all languages have such constructions (even if their particular realization varies of course, manifesting for example as serial verb constructions in individual languages). Then, in the context of the now formally defunct project Causality Across Languages<https://causalityacrosslanguages.wordpress.com/>, I came across additional examples, all of which happen to share with the Japanese case the property of the presence of a “fully productive” (again, in the very specific sense in which I’ve been using that term) morphological causative. So the obvious hypothetical generalization here is that all languages that lack syntactic causatives have fully productive morphological ones. I then turned this generalization around into the stronger, less likely, and thus arguably (even) more interesting version I asked about.

I haven’t thought about this generalization in terms of grammaticalization, at least not in your sense (i.e., grammaticalization as a source-oriented process). I was thinking about it in pragmatic, “ecological” terms (which include grammaticalization from a target-oriented perspective). We have here two tools that can potentially do the same job, so if one of them is more efficient than the other, those among us who are inclined to think that efficiency may have a hand (pun intended) in language change might hypothesize that the presence of the more efficient tool in a language might preempt the grammaticalization of the less efficient one, whereas the presence of the less efficient tool would not preempt the grammaticalization of the more efficient one.

The $64k question then becomes whether fully productive morphological causatives are actually more efficient than syntactic causatives. I’m pretty sure there is currently no psycholinguistic evidence either way. What’s more, I’m actually myself not super-optimistic about a frequency/efficiency-based account, given the very low frequency of syntactic causatives in the narratives my collaborators and I collected in the CAL sample languages (cf. also Haspelmath 2008 and Natalya Levshina’s work).

Best – Juergen

Haspelmath, M. (2008). Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical asymmetries. Cognitive Linguistics 19(1): 1-33.
Levshina, N. (2015). European analytic causatives as a comparative concept: Evidence from a parallel corpus of film subtitles. Folia Linguistica 49(2): 487–520.
Levshina, N. (2016). Why we need a token-based typology: A case study of analytic and lexical causatives in fifteen European languages. Folia Linguistica 50(2): 507–542.
Levshina, N. (2017). Measuring iconicity: A quantitative study of lexical and analytic causatives in British English. Functions of Language 24(3): 319–347.
Levshina, N. (2022). Semantic maps of causation: New hybrid approaches based on corpora and grammar descriptions. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 41(1): 179-205.

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Christian Lehmann <christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de>
Date: Thursday, June 8, 2023 at 2:43 PM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] A generalization about morphological and syntactic causatives
Dear Jürgen,

as you do not reveal what makes you entertain this hypothesis, I can only speculate. Are you thinking of its diachronic side? Synthetic causative construction originate in analytic causative constructions by grammaticalization. As has been known since the beginnings of research in grammaticalization, the genesis of a target construction by grammaticalization does not automatically and instantly lead to the disappearance of its source.

Second, as has also been well known, the less grammaticalized a causative construction is, the more it covers of the spectrum that you call 'fully productive'. In the grammaticalization scenario, the source construction may therefore be fully productive while the target construction is less so. One may therefore believe that the source becomes superfluous and disappears once the target construction has become fully productive.

To the extent that the above is reasonable, your hypothesis could then be true for such syntactic paradigms of causative constructions which are in a grammaticalization relationship. In other words, it could be possible that the counterexamples which you have received in the answers to your question concern such syntactic paradigms which are not in a grammaticalization relationship.

But again, this may or may not be the direction of your hypothesis.

Best, Christian
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