Towards a definition of prototypical causative constructions in English

One of the key concepts in cognitive linguistics is the notion of prototypicality. In this view, category membership is a matter of degree, with a continuum ranging from most central, typical members to most marginal, peripheral ones. The idea of prototypicality was first applied to categories such as colours (Berlin & Kay 1969), cups (Labov 1973), birds (Rosch 1975) or houses (Schmid 1993), which all present good and less good examples. Later, it was suggested that the same was true of linguistic categories, for instance transitivity (Hopper & Thompson 1980) or syntactic constructions (Taylor 1998). It will be shown how the notion of prototype can be used with respect to the phenomenon of English periphrastic causative constructions. First, following Fillmore and the FrameNet Project (see http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~framenet/), I will describe the Frame of causation as made up of up to four Frame Elements, 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. I will then define causation in prototypical terms, namely as ‘direct manipulation’ (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 69-76) exhibiting a number of features among which the humanness of the CAUSE, his/her willingness to perform the action, the perceptibility of the change in the AFFECTED or the distinctiveness between the CAUSE and the AFFECTED (see Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 70-71, Lakoff 1987: 54-55). Finally, I will show how four types of English causative constructions, viz. periphrastic causative constructions with 'cause', 'get', 'have' and 'make', behave with regard to prototypical causation. The results will be based on the analysis of authentic instances of causative constructions extracted from a 10,000,000-word subset of the British National Corpus containing both spoken and written English. On the basis of the corpus data, it is determined whether, say, animate CAUSES are more frequent than inanimate CAUSES or whether the EFFECT usually refers to a volitional or non-volitional process. Brought together, these elements make it possible to situate the statistically most frequent use of each causative verb along the continuum of causation