Periphrastic causative constructions: No more synonymy!
(2007) 2nd International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (ICLCE2) — Location: Toulouse (2.July.2007)
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- English periphrastic causative constructions, i.e. constructions such as 'He makes me laugh' or 'She had the car repaired', are often thought to be more or less equivalent and interchangeable (see e.g. Visser 1973 or Roggero 1979). When they are dealt with in grammars, the focus is usually on complementation, with no indications of other (semantic, stylistic, lexical, etc.) differences. Yet, according to the cognitive principle of No Synonymy (Goldberg 1995), the very existence of distinct causative constructions implies differences between them. In an attempt to characterise these usage differences, a study of the main periphrastic causative constructions (involving the verbs CAUSE, GET, HAVE, and MAKE) was carried out on the basis of a corpus of present-day written and spoken British English (10,000,000-word subset of the British National Corpus), supplemented, when necessary, by experimental data collected through elicitation tests. The data were analysed according to over 40 syntactic, semantic, stylistic and lexical parameters, such as the tense of the causative verb, the animacy of the causer, or the lemma of the non-finite complement. Using various statistical techniques, it was possible to highlight a number of conditioning factors influencing the choice of one particular causative construction over another. Thus, it appears that the best predictor is the lemma of the non-finite verb. [X MAKE Y Vinf], for example, is most likely to occur with the infinitive 'feel', as illustrated in (1). Particularly common too in this construction are the verbs 'laugh', 'look' (mainly as a copular verb) and 'think' – all of which, incidentally, contradict the common claim that causative 'make' predominantly expresses coercion (see e.g. Faure & Casanova 1968 or Werner et al. 1990). (1) That’s right, if it makes you feel good inside I think you should go for it. <BNC:S:FL8 212> These preferences differ from those displayed by the other constructions, with [X HAVE Y Vpp], for example, preferring verbs referring to the frame of service such as 'cut' ('have one’s hair cut'), and [X GET Y Vprp] preferring verbs of (literal or metaphorical) motion, e.g. 'going', 'running', 'moving'. It should be emphasised that, while such lexical preferences have been recognised in the literature for [X MAKE Y Vpp] (cf. Van Ek & Robat 1984), they are almost completely ignored for the other constructions, probably due to the intuition-based approach adopted in most studies of periphrastic causative constructions. Similarly, the analysis of the other parameters reveals important differences between the constructions under investigation. To give a few more examples, it appears that what distinguishes 'get'- from 'have'-constructions is not so much style (as claimed by e.g. Thomson & Martinet 1980), but collocation, with 'get' showing a clear preference for contexts involving some sort of difficulty or effort, cf. (2). It also transpires from the analysis that [X CAUSE Y Vto-inf] is typical of scientific genres and that [X MAKE Y Vinf] often occurs with an inanimate causer (contra Givón 1993). (2) Darren was a poor feeder and mother remembered spending hours with him trying to get him to take the bottle. <BNC:W:CGT 1290> These and other distinctive features will be discussed, and it will be argued that causative constructions should each be considered in their own right (as advocated by Construction Grammar), rather than as a set of synonymous and interchangeable expressions.
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Gilquin, G. (2007). Periphrastic causative constructions: No more synonymy! 2nd International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (ICLCE2), Toulouse. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/225327