Les prédicats causatifs morphologiques en français et en polonais

Abstract

This paper focuses on a group of French and Polish morphological causative constructions in which the cause and effect elements are contiguous. One of the main claims pursued here is that their semantic deep structure is parallel to the one of the respective analytical causative constructions. On the other hand, Polish prefixes are more problematic because of their capacity to express the causation and the perfectibility by the same form. Some linguists claim that there are no causative prefixes in Polish but only flexional circumfixes with the capacity to express the causation. The paper also tackles the problem of definability of causation. Sometimes vastly different ideas are subsumed under this label.