On the Causee Argument in Japanese and Korean Analytic Causative Construction

On the Causee Argument in Japanese and Korean Analytic Causative Construction

  We argue that analytic causatives may be associated with distinct syntactic structures with different interpretive properties among languages. In particular, we examine syntactic and semantic properties of the causee argument in Korean and Japanese analytic causatives. We show that Japanese assigns different syntactic structures to ACC-causatives and DAT-causatives whose difference leads to different interpretive properties observed in the literature. On the other hand, Korean appears to assume the same syntactic structure. We induce pieces of evidence that illustrate this “parametric” differences in the syntax of the analytic causative construction.