‘I make them drink heartily of warm Water three or four Times’: Periphrastic Causative Constructions in Late Modern English Scientific Writing.

Abstract

Periphrastic causative constructions or analytic causative constructions could be defined as “two-part configurations such as He makes me laugh or I had my hair cut, where a causative verb controls a non-finite complement clause and which express a causal relation in which the occurrence of the effect is entailed” (Gilquin 2010: 1; Wolff and Song 2003). According to Gilquin, different structural patterns have different distributions (from the very frequent [X make Y VINF], [X get Y VPP] and [X have Y VPP]; to the extremely rare [X make Y VPP], [X have Y VPRP] and [X have Y VINF]), a fact which may depend on the characteristic features of specific text types, the structure [X cause Y VTO-INF] being “typical of scientific and technical genres [due to a] higher proportion of nominal (rather than pronominal) elements” (2010, 277).

In the literature, Stocker (1990) and Hollmann (2000, 2003) assessed the phenomenon from a diachronic perspective, and Talmy (1986), Kemmer and Verhagen (1994), Stefanowitsch (2001) and Gilquin (2010) did so following a cognitive approach. Moreover, Cottier (1991) focused on cause, get, have and make, Ikegami (1989, 1990a, 1990b) studied the use of have and get, and Kemmer (2001) analysed make. The present study pursues, therefore, the following objectives: 1) to study the distribution of cause, get, have and make in causative constructions in Late Modern English scientific writing; 2) to assess the different levels of attestation in the different text types in the corpus (from medical recipe collections to scientific periodicals, among others; 3) to analyse the different structural patterns in causative constructions over time; and 4) to provide the typology of verbs that have been found to occur in the causative constructions, i.e. ‘I make them drink heartily of warm Water three or four Times’.