As shown by Kayne (1975), Romance causatives with faire fall into two classes, faire infinitif (FI) and faire par (FP). We argue from Italian data that the properties of the two classes depend on the nature of the complement of fare:FI embeds a vP, FP a nominalized VP. The syntactic and semantic characteristics of these complements account straightforwardly for well-known differences between FI and FP, including the previously untreated “obligation” requirement in FI, absent in FP. Our analysis also accounts for another subtle restriction on the formation of FP: the existence of an animacy requirement on the subject of fare, absent in FI. Finally, we argue that only FP can undergo passivization; this accounts for a previously unobserved asymmetry in passivizability of causatives of unergative and unaccusative intransitive verbs.

In this paper we analyse the interdependence of Persian nonverbal (NV) elements and the light verb (LV) in determining the syntactic properties, the event structure, and the alternation possibilities of the entire complex predicate (CP). We argue that these properties provide strong evidence for a constructionalist approach to such phenomena, like that of Keyser (1993, 2002), and that the combination of compositionality and syntactic independence effects observed in these constructions, are difficult, if not impossible, to deal with in a projectionist approach. #

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