On the causative verb faire in Romance languages

• Main Author: Mihaela Adriana Marchis
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti 2014-11-01
• Series: Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics
• Subjects: causatives; restructuring; control; raising
• Online Access: http://bwpl.unibuc.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/BWPL_2014_nr.2_MARCHIS.pdf

Analytic causatives have been of paramount interest in literature on Romance languages beginning with Kayne’s (1975) pioneering work on French faire a vs. faire par analytic causatives. This paper discusses the crosslinguistic variation of causatives in Romance and proposes a fine-grained analysis of them. I show that the (functional/lexical) status and the (non-)restructuring level of the causative verb/affix is a continuum within a language and across languages. Hence, causative expressions can be functional, lexical or ambiguous between restructuring (monoclausal) (cf. Cinque 2002, 2004, Wurmbrand 2003, Folli and Harley 2007, Pylkkänen 2002 and 2008) and non-restructuring in Spanish, Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese.