An Investigation of Lexical Causatives from a Cross- linguistic Perspective

This paper will make an investigation on the properties of lexical causatives from the cross-linguistic perspective. Specifically, we shall contrast the lexical causatives in English, Japanese and Chinese. We adopt Pylkk^inen＇s （2008） minimalist model as the framework. According to this model, the similarity of cross-linguistic causatives is attributed to the presence of the functional head vCAUSE. Variations of causatives in different languages can be attributed to two parameters： （i） whether vCAUSE obligatorily requires the presence of an external argument or not; （ii） the complement of vCAUSE is root-selecting, verb-selecting or phase-selecting. Causatives in languages can be ronghly divided into two types, namely the lexical causatives and the productive ones. As far as lexical causatives are concerned, languages can be classified into Voice-bundling vs. Non-Voice-bundling ones according to whether the presence of an external argument （i.e, causer or cause） is obligatorily required in lexical causatives or not. English is Voice-bundling and Japanese is Non-Voice-bundling. Chinese stands as the third type of languages which may be called semi-Voice-bnndling language since lexical unaccusative causatives in Chinese are Non-Voice-bundling while action-result-compounds unaccusatives （resultative unaccusatives） are Voice-bundling. Causative heads of lexical cat, satires in these three languages are all root-selecting.