Composing events in Romance causative constructions

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Klaus von Heusinger, since 1/2018
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 361344414

The topic of this project is the study of the syntax and semantics of syntactic (or periphrastic) causative constructions in Romance. Its goal is to relate the grammatical properties of the constructions to their semantic interpretation. On a formal level, the term syntactic (or periphrastic) causative refers to constructions where the causative verb appears as a free morpheme followed by a second predicational element, cf. e.g. so-called factitive constructions in Romance, where the causative verb is followed by an infinitive (It. fare dormire i bambini - make sleep.INF the children). This project aims at investigating causative relations expressed by distinct types of syntactic causatives, comparing e.g factitive causatives with constructions where the causative verb embeds an event noun (It. fare una dormita - lit. make a sleeping, fare paura - lit. make fear, to scare). Syntactic causatives in Romance have been considered complex predicative structures, where each predicate contributes one sub-event to the construction. The project presents a new perspective on the study of syntactic causative constructions, by considering more specifically their relation to the cognitive representations of causative structures that they express and the semantic composition of sub-events at the interface with morphosyntax, in the light of a comparative analysis both within and across Romance varieties. Following a comparative approach to the variation observed in the realisation of these syntactic and semantic types, we therefore also discuss specific questions that concern other topics currently debated in Romance linguistics, such as the grammar of nominalisations and the categorial/semantic type of light verbs. In a more general perspective, the project also contributes to the understanding of the primitive of Causation, through the analysis of its linguistic expressions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Dr. Marta Donazzan, until 1/2018