1367260110.5528Understanding Syntax

230Understanding syntaxb. Yongho-ka [ku say-lul cwuk-key] hay-ss-taYongho-nom the bird-acc die-comp do-past‐indic‘Yongho caused the bird to die.’As in English, Korean causatives are complex sentences, containing two clauses. Theembedded clause is in brackets, and contains a complementizer, ‐key, ‘(so) that’. SinceKorean is head‐final, the complementizer ‐key is final in the embedded clause, andthe whole complement clause precedes the verb that selects it, hayssta. Literally, (37b)means ‘Yongho [that the bird died] caused’. The matrix clause is the ‘cause’ clausewith the predicate ha(y) ‘do, make, cause’.French causatives also use a ‘make’ or ‘do’ predicate of causation, the verb faire. In(38), (a) is again the basic sentence and (b) the causative, with the causative verb inbold:(38) a. Jean a lu ce livre. (French)Jean has.3sg read.past participle this book‘Jean has read this book.’b. Nous avons fait lire ce livre à Jeanwe have.1pl make.past participle read.infin this book to Jean‘We made Jean read this book.’However, in French, unlike in Korean or English, the causative does not produce abiclausal construction. Although (38b) does contain two independent lexical verbs,the ‘make’ verb of causation and the ‘read’ verb, in fact the two verbs behave generallyas a single verbal unit and not as predicates in separate clauses. For instance, unlikein English, the two verbs can’t be separated by the NP Jean, as (39) shows:(39) *Nous avons fait Jean lire ce livre.we have.1pl make.past participle Jean read.infin this book(π ‘We made Jean read this book.’)So Jean doesn’t behave like the subject of an embedded clause. In the French, thetwo lexical verbs are actually both inside a single clause, and share a single set ofarguments rather than each having its own arguments as they do in English or inKorean; this should remind you of the verb serialization which we discussed inSection 3.3.3.One kind of typological variation in causatives, then, concerns whether or notthe addition of a causative verb gives rise to an additional clause. However, notall causatives are formed by using an actual causative verb. In Korean, the mostproductive type of causative is that shown in (37b), but there is another type knownas a morphological causative, illustrated in (40):(40) Yongho-ka ku say-lul cwuk-y-ess-ta (Korean)Yongho-nom the bird-acc die-caus‐past‐indic‘Yongho killed the bird.’