A frame-semantic approach to English causative constructions
(2002) Second International Conference on Construction Grammar — Location: Helsinki (6.September.2002)
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- Abstract
- English causative constructions have already been studied from a wide variety of perspectives (e.g. Comrie 1976, Dik 1980, Wierzbicka 1998). However, the theory of Frame Semantics (see Petruck 1996) casts a particularly interesting light on this long-debated linguistic phenomenon. Within this framework, a periphrastic causative construction is made up of up to four Frame Elements (FEs), viz. CAUSE, AFFECTED, EFFECT and PATIENT. The CAUSE is the entity, force or event that changes or influences the AFFECTED, and thereby produces an EFFECT. The PATIENT, when present, refers to the entity that is being ‘acted on’ by the AFFECTED. These elements may be realised differently at the syntactic level, cf. the AFFECTED in: (1) The teacher made her stand in front of the class. (2) She was made to stand in front of the class. and may sometimes remain unexpressed (cf. the CAUSE in (2)). The advantage of such an approach is at least twofold. On the one hand, it gives a unified account of causative constructions, which are all brought together under the frame of ‘Causation’. This is to be contrasted with traditional grammar, where there is a strong tendency to deal with causative verbs according to the type of complement they take (formal criterion), hence a dispersion of causative constructions. On the other hand, Frame Semantics, by assigning a semantic label to each Frame Element, makes it possible to distinguish between, say, (3) I had the student come. and (4) The emperor had the slave imprisoned. While in the traditional view both sentences would be seen as consisting of a subject + causative verb + object + non-finite complement, Frame Semantics makes a distinction between (3), including a CAUSE, an AFFECTED and an EFFECT, and (4), which contains a PATIENT but whose AFFECTED is not expressed (cf. ‘The emperor had his guards imprison the slave’). Each Frame Element of English causative constructions with cause, get, have and make has been studied according to a number of parameters on the basis of corpus data. The corpus used is a 10,000,000-word subset of the British National Corpus and contains both spoken and written English. The aim of this investigation is to answer questions such as: are animate CAUSES more frequent than inanimate CAUSES? is the AFFECTED predominantly expressed as a noun or as a pronoun? does the EFFECT usually refer to a volitional or non-volitional process? Together, such elements make it possible to come to a detailed description of the statistically most frequent use of each causative verb. This use can then be compared with the prototypical notion of causation, defined in terms of ‘direct manipulation’ (see Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 69-76), so as to situate each causative along a continuum of causation.
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Gilquin, G. (2002). A frame-semantic approach to English causative constructions. Second International Conference on Construction Grammar, Helsinki. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/225331