causativization

Causativization is a linguistic process by which a verb phrase is transformed to express that one participant causes another to perform an action or undergo a change of state. The operation typically adds a causer argument and thus increases the verb’s valency by one. Causatives are widespread across languages and interact with voice, aspect, and polarity in diverse ways.

There are several main routes for encoding causation. Morphological (affixal) causatives use a dedicated morpheme or affix attached to the verb to signal the causative meaning. Periphrastic causatives employ an explicit causative word, such as make or cause, often combined with a bare infinitive or another verb. Lexical causatives involve a separate verb whose inherent meaning encodes causation, sometimes with a different subcategorization frame. Some languages allow multiple layers of causation, yielding recursive or chained causatives where a second causative operation applies to an already causativized verb.

English offers clear examples of periphrastic causativization: “The teacher made the student laugh.” Here the base verb laugh is intransitive, and the causative make introduces a causer and a patient that participates in the resulting action. A lexical causative example is “The rain caused the roof to leak,” where the causative verb denotes bringing about the leaking of the roof. In languages with morphological causatives, the causative meaning is built into the verb stem or through an affix, producing a single-word causative form.

Causativization affects argument structure and can interact with cross-linguistic phenomena such as anti-causatives and valency-changing patterns, reflecting the variability of how languages encode causation.