Causatif

Causatif, or causative, is a grammatical category found in many languages that marks that the subject causes someone else to perform an action or to undergo a change of state. It is part of the broader system of voice and transitivity, and it often changes the valency or role structure of a verb.

Causatives can be realized in several ways. Morphological causatives attach affixes or undergo stem changes to create a causative verb, effectively shifting responsibility for the action to a new causer. Periphrastic causatives use auxiliary or auxiliary-like verbs such as make, cause, or have plus a following clause or infinitive to express causation. Some languages have dedicated causative verbs, while others build complex causatives by chaining multiple causative operations. A related concept is anticausative, where a transitive verb becomes intransitive without an explicit external causer.

Cross-linguistic patterns vary. In English, causation is often expressed with the verbs make or cause: for example, make someone do something. Other languages rely on dedicated affixes or verbal semantics to convey causation; Turkish, for instance, employs causative suffixes in many verbs, while Japanese and Korean use specific causative forms derived from the verb stem. Some languages permit multiple layers of causation, yielding causative chains that describe a sequence of caused events.

In linguistic analysis, causatives interact with other verbal systems, such as voice, under the umbrella of transitivity and valency-changing operations. They are commonly contrasted with non-causative inchoatives and with verbs exhibiting causation-neutral or benefactive nuances. The term causatif is widely used in French-language descriptions and in cross-llingual discussions of causative constructions.