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Variability in the Case Patterns of Causative Formation in Romance and Its Implications
- Linguistic Inquiry
- The MIT Press
- Volume 41, Number 3, Summer 2010
- pp. 445-470
- Article
- Additional Information
Taking Folli and Harley's (2007) analysis of Italian fare-causatives as a starting point, and focusing on Spanish, I examine variation in the distribution of the subject of the embedded infinitive in so-called faire-causatives, and I suggest that there is a robust correlation between the size of the embedded complement and the licensing of particular arguments. I reach this conclusion by investigating syntactic complexity in the domain of hacer-causatives, showing that richer structures obtain when Case factors associated with dative-case-marked arguments are considered. I further show that the specific conditions imposed by these arguments are language particular and arise in the language independently of analytical causatives.