On the Determination on a Causative Verb and a Causative Construction

Abstract

In this paper we attempt to show that, contrary to the general opinion that one may call "causative" any construction which contains as its main predicate a "morphologically defined causative" verb, the complex parameters intervene in the determination of a causative verb and a causative construction. It will be shown that a morphologically defined "causative" verb happens to be used in fact as causative with some distributions of No and N" and as non-causative with another distribution. So, the study of any syntactic relation should be made on a sentence-level, not on a morphoiagical word-level.