causative (adj./n.) (caus, CAUS)

A term used in GRAMMATICAL description to refer to the causal relationship between alternative versions of a SENTENCE. For example, the pair of sentences The cat killed the mouse and The mouse died are related, in that the transitive kill can be seen as a ‘causative’ version of the intransitive die, viz. ‘cause to die’ (The cat caused the mouse to die); similarly, some AFFIXES have a causative role, e.g. -ize, as in domesticize (= ‘cause to become domestic’). This is a relationship which is clearly established in the MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURE of some LANGUAGES (e.g. Japanese, Turkish), where an AFFIX can systematically distinguish between non-causative and causative uses of a VERB (‘causative verbs’ or ‘causatives’), e.g. ‘she eats’, ‘she causes (someone) to eat’, which is similar to English she makes him eat. Some linguists have also tried to apply the notion of causative systematically to English, seeing it as an abstract UNDERLYING category from which sets of ‘surface’ verbs (such as kill and die) can be derived.