11h30
Salle 124
Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Structuring a model for lexical causatives
In this paper I propose a semantic analysis for various linguistic causative constructions, through the use of Structural Equation Models (SEMs) (Pearl 2000; Schulz 2011). This analysis takes linguistic expressions of causation, to commonly presuppose SEMs, while adding construction-specific entailments and pragmatic inferences, including various parameters concerning the selection of a cause among a set of conditions. This paper will propose a system, which captures formally Mackie's (1965) intuitions about INUS conditions – and the notion of sufficient sets of conditions. Consequently, this approach will allow us to solve a longstanding puzzle in the linguistics literature, namely, why in certain contexts lexical causative requires "direct causation" (Fodor 1970; Katz 1970; Wolf 2003, inter alia) and in others not (cf. Neeleman and Van de Koot 2012).
