The Linguistic Representations of Causing Events and Caused Events in Narrative Discourse (original) (raw)

Causers in English, Korean, and Chinese and the individuation of events

2009

The kinds of entities that can be described as causing an event depend, in part, on the language one speaks. Whereas in English and Chinese it is possible to say The knife cut the bread or The key opened the door, in Korean and many other languages, such sentences sound very odd. According to the initiator hypothesis, languages fall into two major groups with respect to possible external arguments in causal expressions: those that require that the causer be capable of generating its own energy and those that require only that the causer participate in the causal chain leading up to a particular result. In support of this hypothesis, we show that ability to self-energize has a larger impact on acceptability ratings in Korean than in either English or Chinese (Exp. 1). We also show that restrictions on possible causers extend to the semantics of possible causes in the descriptions of animations depicting causal chains (Exp. 2). Finally, we show that cross-linguistic differences in the linguistic coding of causers may have consequences for the way people conceptualize animations of causal chains in terms of number of events (Exp. 3). Implications for the representation of verb meaning and the semantics of external arguments in other languages are discussed.

The grammar of causatives and the conceptual structure of events

1994

Analytic causative constructions can best be described äs extensions of simpler kinds of expressions, rather than äs reductions from more complex underlying structures. In particular, causatives of intransitive predicates (e.g. I made Mary cryj are viewed äs modelled on simple two-participant clauses (like I ate the cake,), and causatives of transitive predicates (e.g. He had the servant taste the foodj are seen äs modelled on simple threeparticipant clauses (like I gave Mary a flower, or She broke it with a hammer-i.e. mainly ditransitive and instrumental clause types).

Causative constructions

This article offers an overview of the different ways to express causativity in Chinese, also from a diachronic perspective, showing the evolution of the means to express causativity from Old to Modern Chinese.

Direct causation in the linguistic coding and individuation of causal events

Cognition, 2003

This research proposes a new theory of direct causation and examines how this concept plays a key role in the linguistic coding and individuation of causal events. According to the no-interveningcause hypothesis, a causal chain can be described by a single-clause sentence and construed as a single event if there are no intervening causers between the initial causer and the final causee. Consistent with this hypothesis, participants used single-clause sentences (lexical causatives) more often than two-clause sentences (e.g. periphrastic causatives) for causal chains in which (1) the causer and causee touched (Experiments 1 and 2), and (2) an intervening entity could be construed as an enabling condition rather than another cause (Experiments 2-4). In addition, event judgments paralleled linguistic descriptions: chains that could be described with single-clause expressions were more often construed as single events than chains that could not (Experiments 1-3). Implications for languages other than English, for the linguistic coding of accidental outcomes and for the relationship between cognition and language in general are discussed.

A cross-linguistic study of the processing of causative sentences

Cognition, 1979

The comprehension of sentences expressing instigative causation (e.g., The horse makes the camel run) was investigated in children between the ages of 2;0 and 4;4, speaking English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. Crosslinguistic differences in development reveal the roles of morphological (causative particle, case inflection) and syntactic devices (periphrasis, word order) in guiding children's processing of such constructions. It is suggested that local cues (inflectional suffixes, particles, specialized causative verb forms) contribute to the more rapid development of sentence processing strategies in Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. The word order systems of English and Italian, which require that the listener hold the entire sentence pattern in mind in order to determine underlying semantic relations, contribute to slower development on this task, Children's comprehension of causative constructions was studied as one part of a large cross-linguistic investigation conducted in

On causatives -A comparison between European Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese

Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 2022

Based on the caused eventuality, causation can be subdivided into the causation of activity and causation of change of state. By analyzing how causatives are expressed in European Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese, this study shows that these two languages exhibit quite many differences in expressing causation of change of state. We observe that many Portuguese verbs that intrinsically involve causative meanings do not have Chinese equivalence in simplex verb forms-their Chinese counterparts may take complex forms, including a construction we call Causative Resultative V-Vs (CR V-Vs). Differences are also found in the derivational process: whereas anticausation plays a significant role in Portuguese, causation is the primary process in Chinese. We attribute the contrast to different semantics of verb roots in the two languages: Portuguese exhibits plenty of result roots that can intrinsically express caused-result meanings; in contrast, Chinese roots tend to denote either a pure activity or a pure (change of) state, and a causative structure is needed to express causative meanings.