The place of prototypicality in corpus linguistics. Causation in the hot seat

This paper seeks to define prototypical causation as applied to English periphrastic causative constructions. More precisely, it compares three models of prototypical causation described in the literature with the most frequent types of constructions found in corpus data. It is shown that, on the whole, and despite some reconciling factors, linguistic frequency does not coincide with (what is presented in the literature as) cognitive salience. A number of hypotheses are put forward to explain this discrepancy, all of which underline the need to investigate the notion of prototypicality more thoroughly