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Concealed Causatives

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Abstract

Crosslinguistically, causative constructions conform to the following generalization: If the causal relation is syntactically concealed, then it is semantically direct. Concealed causatives span a wide syntactic spectrum, ranging from resultative complements in English to causative subjects in Miskitu. A unified type-driven theory is proposed which attributes the understood causal relation – and other elements of constructional meaning – to type lifting operations predictably licensed by type mismatch at LF. The proposal has far- reaching theoretical implications not only for the theory of compositionality and causation, but also for the underlying theory of events, space, and time in natural language discourse.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University, 18 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA, E-mail

    Maria Bittner

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Bittner, M. Concealed Causatives. Natural Language Semantics 7, 1–78 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008313608525

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