Causative Constructions and Animacy Configurations

Abstract

This paper investigates the semantics of causative constructions in Korean, German and English with regard to their force dynamic profiles à la Talmy (1988), i.e. distributions over animacy configurations of causer and causee. We investigate how the distributions of types of caused predicates are correlated with the (in)animacy criterion of the causer and the causee. We will be concerned with analytic, syntactic causatives in Korean, German and English in which there are separate predicates expressing the notions of causation and the predicate of the effect. This study reveals that contrary to English, the most directly causing event in Korean is part of the inducive causation (human on human). We also discuss German causative constructions which show relatively tighter argument selectional restrictions compared to English.