CLASSIFICATION OF VERBAL CAUSATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN NORWEGIAN: ANALYTIC CAUSATIVE

Abstract

Although the linguistic literature on causatives and causative constructions is one of the most comprehensive ones in the last 40 years, this topic has never been of major interest in Norwegian linguistics. Even today the use of terms causative/causative verb/causative construction, as well as formal and semantic analysis of causation as linguistic category remain inadequately explained and terminologically somewhat misleading. This paper provides a review and analysis of analytic causative constructions in modern Norwegian, as well as their place among other types of causatives (morphological and lexical). The analytic causative construction is the one which encodes the two causative subevents (the causing subevent and the caused subevent) separately, but not necessarily in two separate clauses. The causing subevent is expressed by the auxiliary causative verbs få and gjøre, and the constructions are further distinguished by the kind of complement the auxiliary verb requires: infinitive complement (Røyken fikk meg til å hoste), nominal phrase (Varme gjør meg svett) or prepositional phrase with the motion verb left unexpressed (Vi fikk henne opp på beina). The analytic constructions express degree-membership and can be graded according to the position they have on a formal causative continuum, and can thus lean towards more periphrastic constructions (biclausal causatives) or more synthetic constructions, which is the case with many more or less lexicalized constructions with nominal phrase complements.