Semantic and contextual constraints on the causative alternation in English: a multifactorial analysis

Abstract Many verbs in English show causative and noncausative uses. The goal of this paper is to identify a factor most strongly associated with the realizations of the causative alternation. We report a corpus study that tested effects of three semantic and contextual factors – intentionality, contextual identifiability, and external causality – against 3,864 instances of causative and noncausative uses of 135 alternating verbs extracted from the automatically parsed British National Corpus. Our results of a series of multifactorial analyses of the corpus data indicate that intentionality and contextual identifiability are significantly associated with the realizations, with contextual identifiability being the most predictive factor: causative situations with a clear identifiable agent are realized predominantly as a causative, whereas those with a less clear, non-agentive cause are generally expressed noncausatively. Building on Rappaport Hovav, Malka. (2014). Lexical content and context: The causative alternation in English revisited. Lingua 141. 8–29. DOI:10.1016/j.lingua.2013.09.006, Rappaport Hovav, Malka. (2020). Deconstructing internal causation. In Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal & Nora Boneh (eds.), Perspectives on causations: Selected papers from the Jerusalem workshop 2017 , 219–256. Berlin: Springer and Lee, Hanjung. (2023). Cause identifiability and the causative alternation in English: A corpus-based analysis. Linguistic Research 40(3). 353–385, accounts of contextual constraints on the causative alternation, we propose that the observed pattern of form-meaning associations in the data can be interpreted as a consequence of general principles of communicative efficiency.