Causatives with small clause complements

We discuss the syntactic properties of a small subset of verbs in European Portuguese (EP) that have a causative interpretation and may also have a locative meaning, namely pôr a ‘put to / make’ and deixar a ‘make’. We show that in their non-locative interpretation they are causatives taking as their complement a Prepositional Infinitival Construction (PIC), which we analyze as an AspP, but also a domain in which a predication relationship is established. We thus show that the PIC in EP, which has previously been identified under perception verbs, can also occur as the complement of causatives and we contribute to identify a new class of causatives, which are syntactically distinct from faire-type causatives. We additionally explore a decausative counterpart of one of these syntactic causatives, pôr-se a ‘begin’, which we analyze as a raising verb, close to a semi-auxiliary, whose complement is also an AspP, but not exactly a PIC, to the extent that this AspP does not coincide with a domain in which a predication relationship is established.