On The Causative Construction

Abstract

Japanese was the first language with morphological affixation of causative morphemes to receive serious attention from generative grammarians. It is the first language of several important early generative theoreticians (Saito, Kuroda, Kuno). The typological differences between Japanese and English represented the first exploration of the Universal Grammar hypothesis that contrasted languages from unrelated language families. Consequently, its impact on generative linguistic theories in general and on Principles-and-Parameters approaches specifically has been very significant. The Japanese causative represents in a very pure form the problem of the morphology/syntax interface. Consequently, the causative construction is one of the most theoretically significant aspects of Japanese grammar, its three subtypes having attracted more attention and inspired more theoretical proposals than almost any other construction. Analyses of the causative have had a major influence on many foundational aspects of syntactic theory, including control, case marking, clause structure, theta-theory and argument structure, and the morphology-syntax interface. All of these issues have received extensive treatment in the literature, and this chapter will touch on many of them. We will, however, focus on the importance for linguistic theory of a single problem posed by the construction: In what component of the

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