A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

70 causative
cause and effect leading from the initial bestowal of the name up through its
acquisition by the speaker. The theory was proposed by philosopher Saul (Aaron)
Kripke (b. 1940) in the 1970s as an alternative to the view that denotation is
determined by mental description or other features of the speaker’s psychological
state.
causative (adj./n.) (caus, CAUS) A term used in grammatical description to
refer to the causal relationship between alternative versions of a sentence. For
example, the pair of sentences The cat killed the mouse and The mouse died are
related, in that the transitive kill can be seen as a ‘causative’ version of the
intransitive die, viz. ‘cause to die’ (The cat caused the mouse to die); similarly,
some affixes have a causative role, e.g. -ize, as in domesticize (= ‘cause to
become domestic’). This is a relationship which is clearly established in the
morphological structure of some languages (e.g. Japanese, Turkish), where
an affix can systematically distinguish between non-causative and causative
uses of a verb (‘causative verbs’ or ‘causatives’), e.g. ‘she eats’, ‘she causes
(someone) to eat’, which is similar to English she makes him eat. Some linguists
have also tried to apply the notion of causative systematically to English, seeing
it as an abstract underlying category from which sets of ‘surface’ verbs (such
as kill and die) can be derived.
cavity (n.) (1) In phonetics, this term refers to any of the anatomically defined
chambers in the vocal tract which are the principal formative influences
on the character of a sound. The main cavities are: (a) the oesophageal cavity,
from oesophagus to stomach, which is used only in abnormal speech production,
such as following a laryngectomy operation; (b) the pulmonic cavity,
made up of the lungs and trachea, which is the normal source of speech sounds;
(c) the pharyngeal cavity, from the larynx to the point where the soft palate
makes contact with the back of the throat; (d) the oral cavity, made up of the
whole of the mouth area, and the main means of modifying the resonance of
the sound produced at the larynx; sometimes referred to as buccal; (e) the
nasal cavity, made up of the nose and the part of the pharynx above the point
of soft palate closure.
(2) In Chomsky and Halle’s distinctive feature theory of phonology (see
Chomskyan), cavity features constitute one of the five main dimensions in
terms of which speech sounds are analysed (the others being major class
features, manner of articulation features, source features, and prosodic
features). The features subsumed under this heading, all analysed as
oppositions, are coronal, anterior, tongue-body features (high/low/
back), rounded, distributed, covered, glottal constrictions, and secondary
apertures (nasal and lateral). In some models of feature geometry,
an oral cavity node is introduced, corresponding to the articulatory notion of an
oral cavity constriction. It is represented between the root node and the
place node, thus dominating place and [±continuant] nodes.
c-command see command (2)
cenematics, cenetics (n.) see ceneme (1)