The research presented in this paper investigates the syntactic and semantic similarities among three classes of causative verbs in European Portuguese (EP): Type A causatives (deixar ‘let’, fazer ‘make’, and mandar ‘order’), Type B causatives (deixar a ‘put to’ and pôr a ‘put to’), and a subset of object control verbs (including obrigar ‘force’, forçar ‘force’, and impedir ‘prevent’). The significance of this study lies in its exploration of implicative readings of these verbs, which has been underexplored in the literature. By focusing on the syntactic structures that underlie these verbs, the authors aim to fill a gap regarding how these causative interpretations are realized in EP, contributing to a better understanding of causative constructions in Romance languages.

The methodology employed involves a detailed syntactic analysis of the verb classes in question, utilizing a comparative framework to highlight their structural properties. The authors analyze data from EP, examining the syntactic configurations that allow for the expression of causation and implicative meanings. This approach is novel in that it not only categorizes the verbs based on their syntactic behavior but also investigates the implications of inflected infinitives within these structures. The authors argue that the distribution of inflected infinitives is crucial for understanding the syntactic distinctions between the classes, as it signals different underlying structures that have implications for the verbs’ interpretations.

Key findings reveal that Type A causatives typically exhibit nominative Case for their second argument (DP2), while Type B causatives and object control verbs display accusative Case. The study also demonstrates that implicative object control verbs, such as obrigar, exhibit a one-way implicative nature, entailing the truth of their complements under positive polarity. For example, the sentence “João obrigou suas filhas a comer a sopa” (João forced his daughters to eat the soup) entails that they indeed ate the soup. This contrasts with non-implicative control verbs, which do not guarantee the truth of their complements. The authors conclude that the syntactic proximity of implicative object control verbs to Type A causatives suggests a shared underlying structure, further complicating traditional categorizations of causative verbs.

The broader significance of this research extends to fields such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine translation, where understanding the nuances of causative constructions can enhance the accuracy of language models. By elucidating the syntactic and semantic properties of these verb classes, the findings may inform the development of more sophisticated algorithms for parsing and generating complex sentence structures in EP and potentially other Romance languages. Furthermore, this work contributes to translation studies by providing insights into how different causative meanings can be conveyed across languages, highlighting the importance of syntactic structure in achieving accurate translations. Overall, this study not only advances theoretical linguistics but also has practical implications for language technology applications.

Source: dx.doi.org