Causative
In linguistics, a
causative is a valency-increasing operation that indicates that a subject causes someone or something else to do or be something, or causes a change in state of a non-volitional event. Prototypically, it brings in a new argument, A, into a transitive clause, with the original S becoming the O. All languages have ways to express causation, but differ in the means. Most, if not all languages have lexical causative forms. Some languages also have morphological devices that change verbs into their causative forms, or adjectives into verbs of
becoming. Other languages employ periphrasis, with idiomatic expressions or auxiliary verbs. There also tends to be a link between how "compact" a causative device is and its semantic meaning. Note that the prototypical English causative is
make, rather than
cause. Linguistic terms traditionally are given names with a Romance root, which has led some to believe that
cause is the more prototypical. While
cause is a causative, it carries some lexical meaning and is less common than
make.