causatives

Causatives are linguistic devices that encode a situation in which one participant causes another to perform an action or undergo a change of state. They typically introduce a new causal relationship or increase the valency of a verb, so that the causer brings about an event involving a patient or theme.

There are several mechanisms for encoding causatives. Lexical (inherent) causatives rely on verbs whose meaning already conveys causing an event. Periphrastic causatives use separate words such as make, cause, get, have, or let to express causation. Morphological causatives form a causative meaning by adding affixes or modifying the verb stem, increasing the verb’s valency. Syntactic or diathesis-based causatives rearrange the sentence structure to express causation, sometimes in combination with other devices. Many languages allow stacking multiple causatives, yielding layered or iterative causation.

Examples in English illustrate the main patterns. Periphrastic causatives: The coach made the players run. The manager had the secretary prepare the report. The wind caused the window to break. Letting nouns or clauses express permission or enablement: The child let the dog out. Get- and have-constructions often convey a resulting state: The clerk got the door fixed.

In typology, causatives interact with related notions like anti-causatives or inchoatives (the diagnostic opposite: a change of state without an explicit causer). Across languages, causatives can be morphologically productive, syntactically complex, or expressed by analytic constructions, and many languages allow multiple layers of causation to be expressed within a single clause.