Analytical causatives: from ‘give’ and ‘come’ to ‘let’ and ‘make’
Jaakko Leino and Ruprecht von Waldenfels (eds.)
Bern University, the University of Helsinki
The nine articles of the present volume are concerned with a selection of analytical causative constructions in for the most part European languages, but extending also to English-based creoles and related West African languages and including some non-Indo-European languages of Europe.
The studies in this volume involve diachronic, synchronic and comparative approaches, most of them corpus based. The topics include a variety of semantic, lexical and syntactic issues ranging from the expression of different semantic types of causation (e.g., ’permitting’, ’letting’, ’instigating’) and their relations; different lexical and grammatical causative verbs; the role of negation; the form of the causee phrase (accusative vs. dative causatives); frequency and the role of collocations in the acquisition of causatives by second language learners; grammaticalization, post-causative developments, and others. The languages studied include English, Swedish, Finnish, Estonian, Russian, Hungarian, Early New High German, as well as English-based Creoles.
Together, the articles show that an even closer look at analytical causatives is in place and provide the interested reader with novel insight and findings relevant not only in respect to the languages covered, but also from a cross-linguistic perspective. The volume assumes a polytheoretical approach. Despite a loosely cognitivistic overall bias, each author brings in their theoretical views of the syntax, semantics, and typological properties of analytical causatives, contributing to a complex and fascinating panorama of constructions and issues, many yet to be fully understood.
Contents:
Ruprecht von Waldenfels and Jaakko Leino
Preface
Kofi Yakpo
Betwixt and between.
Causatives in the English-lexicon creoles of West Africa and the Caribbean
Gaëtanelle Gilquin
Lexical infelicity in English causative constructions. Comparing native and learner collostructions
Thomas Egan
Analytic permissives in Present-day English
Gudrun Rawoens
Analytical causative constructions in Swedish: an analysis of syntactic and semantic patterns
Barbara Hans-Bianchi
The causative construction in Early New High German: the hidden link between semantics and grammaticalisation
Gréte Dalmi
Dative causatives in Hungarian
Ruprecht von Waldenfels
Finnish antaa and Russian davat’ ‘to give’ as causatives: a contrastive analysis
Jaakko Leino
Analytical expressions for permissive causation in Finnish
Anne Tamm
Let me introduce the Estonian analytical causatives: the permissive and factitive laskma ‘let, make, have, allow, permit’
ISBN 9783862883622. LINCOM Studies in Language Typology 24. 293pp. 2012.
