English Causatives: A "Causal-chain Windowing" Perspective

Causation, a basic category in human conceptualization, is ubiquitous, and every language seems to posses a means of expressing it. Such a category is an ideal field for investigation and has received meticulous scrutiny. However, conventional linguistic approaches have merely provided specific methods to describe the various properties of causatives while taken little note of the cognitive operation of the speaker or conceptualizer in the construal of causatives.The current research paper adopts a cognitive linguistic approach, which is known to be the one that is based on our experience of the world and the way we perceive and conceptualize it. Our "causal-chain windowing" perspective on causatives is inspired by Talmy's "windowing of attention" approach. Talmy (2000) claims that many events involving causation should be treated as complex sequences of more elementary stages and subevents, each of which is linked to the next by a causal relation. Conceptualizers place linguistically a portion of a coherent referent situation into the foreground by explicit mention of that portion, while placing the remainder of that situation into the...