Équivalents tchèques des constructions causatives françaises faire + infinitif : le domaine des causatifs synthétiques

Abstract

The aim of this article is to survey expressions that contain a causative meaning in Czech. It emerged that the most efficient method lies in parallel research in corpus InterCorp that makes it possible to proceed from the French causative construction faire + infinitive, an exemplary causative, which is universal and frequent enough to reveal heterogeneous causative contexts. Additionally, there is an attempt to clarify and classify corresponding Czech equivalents. Except for some non-causative expressions, this procedure successfully resulted in four causative types, namely the morphological, synthetic, analytical and sentential causatives. Their names indicate on which level the causative meaning is formed. The second advantage of the corpus-based approach consists in the statistical tool that indicates the predominance of synthetic causatives in Czech. As a result, the causativity is defined in terms of three parameters: the formal marking between the causative and non-causative phrase, the syntactic process that changes the valency and the crucial semantic definition. The secondary analysis provides more detailed commentary on some Czech causatives and examines what type of context is the most convenient for the causative meaning.

Keywords

• Analytical causatives
• causative constructions
• morphological causatives
• French