ASPECTS OF THE SPANISH CAUSATIVE CONSTRUCTION

This thesis is an empirical and theoretical study of several syntactic phenomena associated with the Spanish causative-infinitive construction. Competing accounts of Spanish causatives are reviewed in order to clarify the important empirical and theoretical claims that they make. Certain empirical claims which crucially distinguish one account from another are tested against a substantial body of Spanish data gathered from both literary sources and native speakers.;Chapter II is an overview of a series of challenges that have been raised to either Standard Theory or to the Generative-Transformational model at least partially on the basis of facts about causative constructions.;In Chapter III several comprehensive accounts of Romance causatives are summarized and classified according to the range of facts they attempt to explain and the mechanisms they propose.;Chapter IV deals with differing claims about and accounts of the phenomenon of case alternation of the complement subject clitic. In particular, the transitivity hypothesis, central to several accounts, is tested empirically. Although transitivity of the complement verb is found to correlate statistically with the case of the complement subject clitic, case is also shown to vary systematically with the reference of the clitic and with the particular causative verb.;Chapter I discusses the notion "causative" in general terms and notes that the term, as employed in linguistic literature, refers primarily to a syntactic, and not semantic, class of verbs.;Chapter V discusses differing formulations of a constraint on complement object clitic climbing which crucially involve the variable animacy. An attempt is made to clarify the facts and to choose among competing proposals.;Chapter VI deals with a syntactic fact associated with Spanish causatives which has received little notice and no account in linguistic literature. Under certain circumstances, reflexive verbs embedded in infinitive form under causative matrices appear without reflexive morphology. The facts are demonstrated with data from literary sources and native speakers and a tentative account is offered referring to the semantics of the causative verb, the semantics of the infinitive, and the notion "intermediacy".