Causative 'cause', 'get', 'have' and 'make': A preliminary study

A plethora of studies from various linguistic trends have been devoted to causative constructions (e.g. Shibatani 1975, 1976, Ritter & Rosen 1993, Song 1996). The specificity of this study is two-fold. First, it does not deal with ‘the causative construction’ in general, but exclusively focuses on four causative verbs, viz. 'cause', 'get', 'have' and 'make', the most frequent periphrastic causatives with no or little semantic content on their own, apart from the causative meaning of ‘bringing about’ (unlike for instance 'force', which, besides causation, also clearly expresses coercion). Although those verbs are dealt with in most grammars, no satisfactory account is given of the circumstances in which each of them should be used, nor the consequences of the use of a particular type of complement (infinitive, past participle or present participle). The second distinguishing feature of this study is that it is based on corpus data, so that it should give a better idea of how causative verbs behave in authentic present-day English (precise meaning, frequency, diatypic variation, registers, combinatorial properties, etc.). This presentation will fall into two parts. First, I will show how causative constructions such as 'John made her laugh' or 'I had my watch repaired' can be retrieved from corpora (semi-)automatically. More specifically, I will compare the results achieved with a concordancer like XKwic, a piece of software developed at the University of Stuttgart which can carry out highly refined and specialised linguistic searches, and with ICECUP, the program designed to query the International Corpus of English (ICE) and working on the basis of ‘Fuzzy Tree Fragments’ representing the grammatical structure of sentences. This comparison will highlight the fact that, although ICECUP has higher precision and recall rates, as long as it cannot be used in conjunction with other (larger) corpora, a more ‘classical’ concordancer will be needed to thoroughly investigate relatively rare phenomena such as periphrastic causative constructions. Secondly, I will present the preliminary results reached on the basis of ICE-GB (1,000,000-word corpus), the British component of ICE. Following the functional ‘one meaning, one form’ principle, I put forward the hypothesis that there must be differences between the four causative verbs 'cause', 'get', 'have' and 'make'. In order to test that hypothesis, the causative sentences retrieved were examined both quantitatively and qualitatively with respect to a number of syntactic, stylistic and semantic parameters. The syntactic survey focused on the types of structures that are available for each causative (bare infinitive or to-infinitive, present participle, main clause or subclause passivization). From a stylistic point of view, I investigated whether the four verbs and their non-finite complements were stylistically differentiated by comparing their frequencies in speech and writing, as well as in the different genres of ICE (e.g. novels/stories, business letters, face-to-face conversations, etc.). Semantically speaking, finally, I followed Fillmore and his theory of Frame Semantics (cf. the FrameNet Project) in viewing causative constructions as made up of three ‘Frame Elements’, viz. The explosion (Cause) caused the temperature (Affected) to rise (Effect). Each Frame Element can be described in terms of various features, such as animacy of the Cause and the Affected, volitionality of the Effect, or degree of coercion involved. The semantic study also includes a collocational analysis, whose aim is to determine the preferential lexical company kept by each causative verb. Only the most significant results will be outlined here. It should be emphasised, however, that those results are based on a relatively small number of instances (40 constructions with 'cause', 101 with 'get', 77 with 'have' and 150 with 'make') and therefore need to be substantiated by further and more extended research