The grammatical and conceptual ingredients of what happens next

There are a number of phenomena where an apparent animacy requirement exceptionally admits some inanimate causers as felicitous. In this paper I argue that these should be explained not by an syntactically visible animacy feature but rather by a “what-can-cause-what" approach. In this kind of approach, judgments of felicity occur exactly when the cause is conceptually able to cause the effect. I show how a what-can-cause-what approach for futurates and have causatives explains their felicitous inanimate causer exceptions and other behavior, via a novel notion of “dispositional causation”, where the dispositions in question include both intentions of animate entities and physical tendencies of both animate and inanimate entities. Both dispositions and disposers can either be explicitly present in the syntactic structure, or merely implicitly available through the accommodation of a conceptual model of dispositional structure.