Passivisability of English periphrastic causatives.

Causatives in English and other languages display differences in passivisability. In line with e.g. Rice (1987) it is argued that this variation is due to different degrees of semantic transitivity. Transitivity is defined in terms of Hopper and Thompson’s (1980) parameters, modified in the light of typological research on causatives. The British National Corpus was used to obtain examples of both active and passive periphrastic causative make, semantically the most general causative. A comparison between these two data sets yields quantitative evidence for a number of correlations between transitivity properties and passivisability. Because of the generality of make the results may be extended to other causatives. And due to the grounding in typological work the correlations can be stated as implicational universals. These universals explain many of the facts of differential passivisability but some additional hypotheses are made to account for more. A few questions remain, but these may evaporate if we allow for the possibility that some semantic factors are more important than others.