Causal necessity, causal sufficiency, and the implications of causative verbs

Against past analyses, we propose that natural language causatives do not universally encode a single, unanalyzable bringing about meaning like Dowty’s (1979) CAUSE, but instead draw on an inventory of contrasting causal dependency relations. To illustrate this claim, we focus on the English causative verbs make and cause. We point out a number of differences in their inferential profiles, and argue that these follow from the fact that cause...