Finding the best fit for direct and indirect causation: a typological study

Abstract

natalia Levshina. Finding the best fit for direct and indirect causation: a typological study. the poznań Society for the advancement of arts and Sciences, pL ISSn 0079-4740, pp. 65-82 the contrast between direct and indirect causation is the most widely discussed semantic distinction in the literature on causative constructions. this distinction has been claimed to correlate with a number of formal parameters, such as formal distance, productivity and length, which are linked to different functional and diachronic explanations based on the principles of iconicity and economy. the present study tests these claims on a typologically representative sample of languages from 46 diverse families, examining four formal variables and their association with (in)directness of causation. according to the data, formal length displays the most pervasive association with the semantic distinction in question, which supports the economy-based explanation. In addition, the relative prominence of the other formal parameters depends on the type of causatives and their stage of grammaticalization.

Universals of causative and anticausative verb formation and the spontaneity scale

“…We find similar mirror-image patterns in other domains such as adpossessive marking (haspelmath 2017) and singulative/plurative marking (haspelmath & Karjus 2017). Levshina's (2016) (in this issue) study of contrasting causative markers in 46 unrelated languages arrives at results that are fully compatible with the present findings: Markers of indirect causation (which include causatives of transitive and unergative verbs) tend to be longer, more productive, more autonomous, and more distant from the base than markers of direct causation. Levshina likewise attributes this to the fact that markers of direct causation are more frequent and more expected than markers of indirect causation.…”