Causation in Grammatical Structures

This book brings together research on the topic of causation from experts in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. It seeks to arrive at a more sophisticated understanding both of how causal concepts are expressed in causal meanings, and how those meanings in turn are organized into structures. Chapters address some of the most exciting current issues in the field, including the relata of causal relations; the representation of defeasible causation within verb phrases and at the level of modality; the difference between direct and indirect causal chains; and the representation of these chains in syntax. The book examines data from a wide variety of languages, such as Tohono O'odham, Finnish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Hindi, and Karachay-Balkar, and will be of interest to syntacticians and semanticists, as well as psycholinguists and philosophers, from graduate level upwards.

1 - Introduction
2 - Theories of causation can and should inform linguistic theory
3 - Formal semantics for causal constructions
4 - Two types of causal statements
5 - Force dynamics in causal meaning and reasoning
6 - Eliminating causative entailments with the force-dynamic framework: The case of the Tohono O'odham frustrative cem
7 - Modality and causation: Two sides of the same coin
8 - Intentional action and the semantics of gradable expressions (on the Knobe Effect)
9 - Causation at the syntax-semantics interface
10 - Causal chains and instrumental case in Hindi/Urdu
11 - Causativization and event structure
12 - Inadvertent cause and the unergative-unaccusative split in Vietnamese and English
13 - Causatives and inchoatives in the lexicon and the syntax: evidence from Italian
14 - Event-structural prominence and forces in verb meaning shift

Bridget Copley is a chargée de recherche at the laboratory Structures Formelles du Langage, jointly affiliated with the Centre Nationale de la Recherche and the Université Paris 8. Her research interests include the semantics and syntax-semantics interface of causation, aspect, futures, and modality. Copley received her Ph.D. in Linguistics and Philosophy in 2002 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is the author of The Semantics of the Future (Routledge, 2009). ; Fabienne Martin is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institut für Linguistik of the University of Stuttgart. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics in 2006 from the Université libre de Bruxelles, and is the author of Les Prédicats statifs (De Boeck, 2009). Her research interests include lexical semantics, aspect and the semantics/pragmatics interface.