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Collection Highlights

Studies in Classical Hebrew 1st Edition Moshe Bar-Asher

Global Sourcing of Digital Services Micro and Macro

Perspectives 11th Global Sourcing Workshop 2017 La Thuile
Italy February 22 25 2017 Revised Selected Papers 1st
Edition Ilan Oshri

Algorithmic Aspects of Cloud Computing Third International

Workshop ALGOCLOUD 2017 Vienna Austria September 5 2017
Revised Selected Papers 1st Edition Dan Alistarh

Bridging Research and Practice in Science Education

Selected Papers from the ESERA 2017 Conference Eilish
Mcloughlin
Graphical Models for Security 4th International Workshop
GraMSec 2017 Santa Barbara CA USA August 21 2017 Revised
Selected Papers 1st Edition Peng Liu

Graphics Recognition Current Trends and Evolutions 12th

IAPR International Workshop GREC 2017 Kyoto Japan November
9 10 2017 Revised Selected Papers Alicia Fornés

Mobility Analytics for Spatio Temporal and Social Data

First International Workshop MATES 2017 Munich Germany
September 1 2017 Revised Selected Papers 1st Edition
Christos Doulkeridis

Studies on Speech Production 11th International Seminar

ISSP 2017 Tianjin China October 16 19 2017 Revised
Selected Papers Qiang Fang

Urban and Transit Planning: A Culmination of Selected

Research Papers from IEREK Conferences on Urban Planning,
Architecture and Green Urbanism, Italy and Netherlands
(2017) Hocine Bougdah
Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science

Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal

Nora Boneh Editors

Perspectives on
Causation
Selected Papers from the Jerusalem
2017 Workshop
Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History
of Science

Series Editors
Orly Shenker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The Sidney M. Edelstein
Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine
Nora Boneh, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Language, Logic
and Cognition Center, The linguistics Department
Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science sets out to present state of
the art research in a variety of thematic issues related to the fields of Philosophy of
Science, History of Science, and Philosophy of Language and Linguistics in their
relation to science, stemming from research activities in Israel and the near region
and especially the fruits of collaborations between Israeli, regional and visiting
scholars.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/16087

Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal • Nora Boneh
Editors

Perspectives on Causation
Selected Papers from the Jerusalem 2017
Workshop
Editors
Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal Nora Boneh
Language, Logic and Cognition Center, Language, Logic and Cognition Center,
The Department of Hebrew Language The Linguistics Department
Hebrew University of Jerusalem Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jerusalem, Israel Jerusalem, Israel

ISSN 2524-4248 ISSN 2524-4256 (electronic)

Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science
ISBN 978-3-030-34307-1 ISBN 978-3-030-34308-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34308-8

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Preface

Causation stands at the heart of all sciences, and as such, philosophers, linguists,
and cognitive scientists seek to understand the exact nature of this concept and how
causal structures are represented in the human cognitive systems.
The philosophical models have been a central motor and a constant point of
reference in how thought and to some extent methodology in other disciplines
have been shaped. For example, linguists often borrow philosophers’ analyses
of causation and assume that the relevant linguistic expressions denote such
concepts. Similarly, psychologists and cognitive scientists put to the test models of
causation in investigating central cognitive competencies such as causal learning
and reasoning. The connections between the disciplines, however, are definitely
not unidirectional. Philosophers, for example, occasionally seek insights from the
linguistic literature in understanding what yields certain interpretations of causal
statements. Similarly, other types of interactions can be sought: cognitive psycholo-
gists may benefit from being informed by linguistic analyses in their explorations of
specific human behavior involving language. And of course, linguists may benefit
from cognitive investigations that can be brought to bear on questions pertaining to
domain generality of language, taking causation and its linguistic encoding to be a
study case.
These broad considerations served as the framework for an interdisciplinary
encounter held in June 2017 at the Language, Logic and Cognition Center at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where scholars from the three disciplines attended
the workshop Linguistic Perspectives on Causation. This workshop aimed to bring
together cognitive psychologists, linguists, and philosophers in order to explore
further how the different disciplines can be beneficial and instructive to one another.
The selection of papers grouped in this volume stems from the talks presented at
that workshop, representing a wide range of angles on the study of causation in the
three abovementioned disciplines. To reflect this, the papers are organized in five
parts. In what follows, we present the structure of the book, briefly describing the
papers constituting it.
Part one, titled Perspectives on Causation, concentrates on points of junction
between philosophical and linguistic studies on causation. It consists of papers by

v
vi Preface

Bar-Asher Siegal & Boneh and by Hitchcock. The adoption of central concepts
from classic philosophical accounts to causal relations by linguists stands at the
heart of Bar-Asher Siegal & Boneh’s paper. This paper scrutinizes to what extent
the philosophical concepts are applicable for linguistic analyses of various causative
constructions. In turn, it also critically evaluates cases in which philosophical
discussions seek insights from judgments that are primarily linguistic when dealing
with the metaphysics of causation. In its panoramic perspective on causation and
causative constructions, and with its consideration of the meeting points between
disciplines, this first chapter can also be read as an introduction to the volume, since
it locates the other papers of this book in the discussions it surveys.
Hitchcock’s paper points to the discrepancy between what looks like the binary
representation of causation in language and the way causal relations are modelled in
the framework of the structural equation model, where such relations are sensitive to
multiple variables. He asks how we successfully communicate about causal relations
given this discrepancy.
The papers of the second part, grouped under the title Methodology: Uncov-
ering the Representation of Causation, propose novel methodologies for study-
ing representations of causation. Bellingham, Evers, Kawachi, Mitchell, Park,
Stepanova & Bohnemeyer’s paper presents preliminary findings of the project
Causality Across Languages. Whereas, usually, linguistic studies presuppose some
implicit semantic criterion to what should be included under the category of
“causative constructions,” this study proposes to begin from a systematic observa-
tion of how speakers of different communities communicate about various cognitive
concepts. It proposes several methodologies for exploring production, comprehen-
sion, and conceptualization of causation across a sample of languages. Their studies
pay particular attention to cultural influences and crosslinguistic differences, when
subjects are presented with various visual scenarios, and judge what they have
been shown. The preliminary results are relevant for inquiries interested in causal
pluralism, subcategories of causation (e.g., physical vs. abstract), and crosslinguistic
differences between causative constructions and issues pertaining to lexicalization
vs. pragmatic enrichment in the linguistic representation of causation.
In turn, the paper by Hagmayer & Engelmann traces the way people ask
questions in order to get or give explanations. The goal of their experiments is to
gain insights into the validity of two groups of cognitive-psychological theories of
causal explanations, dependency-related and mechanistic, the assumption being that
the different theories require different types of knowledge for causal explanation.
This paper provides a good overview of current cognitive-psychological theories
for how people explain facts, and its originality lies in the methodology: the authors
allow participants to ask unguided questions seeking explanations, which are in turn
the object of a quantitative analysis, unlike the standard methodology of presenting
subjects with information and then asking them to judge or evaluate.
The next two parts of the book are dedicated to linguistic analyses of causative
constructions. The papers in part three revolve around the topic of Meaning Com-
ponents of Causation. Each of the four papers in it tackles phenomena pertaining to
central inquiries in lexical semantics and in so doing deal with a variety of essential
Preface vii

questions in the literature, among them, event causation, direct causation, internal
causation, zero-change and defeasible causation, and the agent/causer distinction.
The paper by Croft & Vigus is couched in a force dynamics framework. It extends
the first author’s seminal theory of argument realization, where causation serves
as an organizational factor in lexical semantics, to cases in which one finds event
nominals instead of individual participants as arguments of the predicate. Based on
a crosslinguistic investigation, this paper argues that event nominals correspond to
participant sub-events, which are in turn realized according to the same rules as
participants in the causal chain.
Levin’s paper provides support for the prototypical conception of direct causa-
tion in the literature by examining resultative predicates in transitive constructions,
both when the direct object NP is selected by the main verb and in cases where it is
not. It shows that the notion of direct causation, in terms of absence of intervening
participant that applies in the case of simplex causative verbs, also holds here. The
constructions are of interest since they represent concealed causatives, and at the
same time, they behave similarly to sentences with lexical causative verbs, with
respect to direct causation. This observation raises a fundamental question regarding
causative constructions: what is the source of the causative component in them? – a
question that can be of interest to scholars outside of linguistics as well.
Next, Rappaport Hovav’s paper undermines the linguistic validity of the widely
accepted division between internally and externally caused change of state verbs.
This division relies on the assumption that the so-called internally caused verbs
appear as intransitives only – lacking an external cause. The author demonstrates
that what has been accepted in the literature as rigid generalizations is, in fact,
merely a tendency. She, consequently, claims that it does not reflect any grammatical
property of change of state verbs. Instead, the data propose various general princi-
ples that govern lexical causatives and the (non)appearance of cause arguments,
which shape this tendency.
In the last paper of this part, Martin elucidates, on the basis of experimental
studies in Mandarin, French, and English, the crosslinguistic tendency for zero-
change use of causative predicates to occur with an agentive subject contrary to a
cause subject, or an intransitive verb, where zero-change does not arise. It proposes
two types of arguments introducing heads and considers in detail how they combine
with the VPs in languages with weak perfectives and in cases where the verb has a
sub-lexical modal component, yielding defeasible causatives. This paper introduces
different ways in which causal relations are represented in the syntax and how it
affects the semantics of such constructions.
The last point regarding Martin’s paper can also serve to introduce the fourth
part of the book, titled Syntactic and Semantic Aspects of Causation, as the first
two papers by Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou and Ahdout, as well as Doron’s,
deal with the distinction between agent and causer and its adequate linguistic
representation. All papers in this part argue that, at least at the syntactic level, causal
relations are represented in more than one way.
Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou discuss the syntactic properties of subjects of
a subclass of psychological predicates (e.g., interest) and claim that there is a
viii Preface

syntactic distinction between the types of causers they license: agents introduced
by Voice and causers introduced in the specifier position of vP, assimilating the
latter to internally caused causative verbs. Contrary to Martin’s semantic account
that distinguishes agent from causers, Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou claim that
causers form one syntactic domain with the result state constituent, whereas agents
do not. This difference in structure, according to them, also explains the patterns
observed with defeasible causatives with coerced psychological predicates. Their
account also advocates in favor of syntactic indistinctness in encoding causation in
the physical and psychological domains.
Ahdout in turn describes a phenomenon known as agent exclusivity effect in
nominalizations of causative verbs. It has been shown, mainly on the basis of data
drawn from English, that agents in this syntactic environment are licit, whereas
causes are not. Previous work has provided syntactic analyses to account for this
effect, claiming that agent and cause are attached in constructions of different
sizes and therefore can or cannot fit in nominalizations. Other accounts sought
the difference in the type of Voice head available. On the basis of new data from
Hebrew, Ahdout shows that like in Greek, Romanian, and German, the agent
exclusivity effect can be overridden with cause-PPs, therefore casting doubt on
previous analyses. This paper, like the two previous ones, makes clear that at some
level of representation, agents and causes are different. An interesting question
raised here is whether causation can be taken to be a meaning primitive or rather
is read off the structure post-syntactically.
Next, Nash’s paper is concerned with the syntactic and lexical semantic prop-
erties of embedded causees in Georgian. Her central claim is that in neither of
the constructions, the causee is realized as an agent, even if it is an agent in the
simple, unembedded, verb. The paper surveys ways in which the agent argument
is “demoted” when it surfaces as the causee in these causative constructions.
In particular, the paper unveils subtle differences between types of causativized
transitive verbs and provides a novel discussion of causativized unergatives. The
investigation of the syntactic and lexical semantic properties of these constructions
proposes a take on the issue of direct vs. indirect causation by analyzing the
structural and semantic properties of an intervening event participant, between the
causer and the effect. Interestingly, in relation to the main discussion in the previous
three papers, Georgian, at least, does not distinguish between agents and causers at
the structural level.
Returning to psychological predicates, Doron distinguishes between two sub-
classes of verbs, realizing differently the causer component, taken to be an argument,
rather than a relational element. One subclass consists in a two-place relation
between the experiencer argument and the T/SM argument, where the cause
brings about the relation; the other subclass is a one-place property predicate, the
experiencer argument being the subject. In this analysis, the cause argument varies
in its interpretation according to its broader environment. The paper goes on to show
that these two subclasses are not particular or special to the psychological domain;
rather, they pattern like stative physical predicates.
Preface ix

Lastly, Charnavel departs from the other authors in this part in focusing on the
connectives because and since rather than on the lexical properties of verbs. She
proposes that these connectives constitute attitude contexts introducing a judge from
whose perspective the causal relation between the content of the main clause and
that of the adjunct clause is evaluated. The paper argues that the causal judge is
syntactically present. It is shown, on the basis of data collected in experiments, that
the causal judge is introduced as an argument of the connective and is identified
through exhaustive binding by the closest relevant attitude holder in the sentence,
which is either the speaker alone or the speaker together with a relevant animate
event participant. This depends on the site of adjunction of the because and since
phrase, allowing in the first case, but not in the second, an animate event participant
to be the attitude holder controlling the judge.
The closing fifth part contains two papers concerned with Philosophical
Inquiries on Causation by Statham and Kment. Statham’s paper surveys recent
advances in philosophical thinking about causation and causal reasoning, paying
particular attention to those models construing causation reasoning as deviation
from the norm. Similarly to Hitchcock, this paper also considers and evaluates the
structural equation model as a powerful system for representing causal systems.
Considering causal relations through deviation from the norms leads the author
to break from the tradition that bases the metaphysics of causation on insights
from the physical and natural world of laws, independent of human concerns. One
consequence of this is the enrichment of the traditional classification of types of
clausal claims customarily distinguishing type and token claims and taking only
tokens to be deviant, whereas types are always normal. The novel proposal in the
paper is that these categories of claims are orthogonal, and therefore, one can also
encounter deviant types. The paper invites further investigation of the question how
the typological abundance of causal relations made available by the recent models
can inform linguistic research and more generally the issue of sub-types of causal
locutions.
Kment’s paper criticizes the standard view, attributed to Lewis, according to
which, causal relationships are defined by counterfactual dependency. Instead, he
argues that counterfactual dependence provides evidence for causal connections
but does not constitute them. That is, counterfactual reasoning is only useful for
establishing causal claims, and natural laws and past history are needed to establish
a new claim about relationships of (actual token) causation. This paper is in line with
the literature in philosophy and in linguistics, according to which, counterfactual
statements are accounted for by causal relations, since prior knowledge is required
for establishing such claims. In this sense, it elucidates that one is not reducible to
the other.
While this preface provides one way of grouping the papers thematically, various
other ways could be thought of, according to several recurrent topics throughout this
book, regardless of the discipline of each chapter. We will briefly mention some, so
as to propose ideas for other possible inquires across disciplines.
Many discussions in this volume can be read with the fundamental question in
mind of whether and how causality can be reduced to other noncausal terms (Croft
x Preface

& Vigus, Hagmayer & Engelmann, Kment and Rappaport Hovav). Another central
question is whether it is advisable to consider causal pluralism instead of one all-
encompassing causative account for causation (Bellingham et al. and Hagmayer
& Engelmann). As noted earlier, this question can be extended to the syntactic
representation of the causal relations, inquiring whether it is better to assume a
single syntactic structure or multiple ones. Another relevant question that received
different treatments is whether causal relations are different when the effect pertains
to the mental realm and whether, linguistically, such descriptions are grammatically
marked (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou, Bellingham et al., Croft & Vigus, and
Doron).
Turning to the lexico-syntactic representations of causal relations, many authors
indirectly deal with the basic question of what categories constitute causative
constructions, in terms of types of arguments implicated in them and their selectors
or introducers. More specifically, under discussion is the question whether, on
the one hand, it is necessary that such constructions denote causal relations, as
some authors consider constructions which do not entail the effect took place,
and on the other hand, whether it is sufficient that such relations are entailed in
order to be analyzed as causative constructions, as is the case with, for example,
concealed causatives, when causation is not marked overtly (Ahdout, Alexiadou &
Anagnostopoulou, Charnavel, Croft & Vigus, Levin, Martin and Nash).
There are also questions across disciplines, which at least at first sight seem
similar, but one is left to wonder how exactly the different types of discussions
should or can interact. We have in mind issues pertaining to the relata in the causal
relations (Bellingham et al., Croft & Vigus, Doron, Hitchcock and Levin) and the
issue of causal selection, and under this category, we also include the restriction
of direct causation in different constructions (Bellingham et al., Hitchcock, Levin,
Rappaport Hovav and Statham).
This is only a sample of topics that one repeatedly encounters when reading the
papers in this volume. In our own chapter (Bar-Asher Siegal & Boneh), we elaborate
more on these themes and reflect on how the contributions of the papers in this
volume are relevant to them.
∗

We would like to conclude by noting that this book represents a community

effort. Notably, all authors dedicated time and energy to participate in a true
interdisciplinary conversation and sought ways in which less familiar knowledge
and methods can inform and improve their own scholarship. Additionally, all papers
in this volume were read and reviewed by two to three scholars, most of the
reviewers participated in the conference, which initiated this volume. It is our
privilege to thank the reviewers for the hard work they have put into providing
helpful and constructive reviews. At the same time, we wish to acknowledge the
willingness of the authors to go outside of their comfort zone and implement insights
from other disciplines. It is our hope that more interdisciplinary contributions in the
study of causation will follow this volume.
Preface xi

We are grateful to Orly Shenker for intellectually and materially supporting this
endeavor, in inviting us to inaugurate the linguistic part of the series Jerusalem
Studies in Philosophy and History of Science. We would like to thank Padmapriya
Ulaganathan and Malini Arumugam from Springer for their hard work in bringing
this book to publication.
Finally, with an ache in our hearts, we reserve a special thought to our mentor and
colleague, Edit Doron, who passed away at the end of March 2019, just a few weeks
after submitting her paper for this volume. Her relentless quest for knowledge and
intellectual breadth had an important role in the journey that led to this volume and
will continue to be a source of inspiration.

Jerusalem, Israel Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal

August 2019 Nora Boneh
Contents

Part I Perspectives on Causation

1 Causation: From Metaphysics to Semantics and Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal and Nora Boneh
2 Communicating Causal Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Christopher Hitchcock

Part II Methodology: Uncovering the Representation of Causation

3 Exploring the Representation of Causality Across
Languages: Integrating Production, Comprehension and
Conceptualization Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Erika Bellingham, Stephanie Evers, Kazuhiro Kawachi,
Alice Mitchell, Sang-Hee Park, Anastasia Stepanova and Jürgen
Bohnemeyer
4 Asking Questions to Provide a Causal Explanation – Do
People Search for the Information Required by Cognitive
Psychological Theories?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
York Hagmayer and Neele Engelmann

Part III Meaning Components of Causation

5 Event Causation and Force Dynamics in Argument Structure
Constructions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
William Croft and Meagan Vigus
6 Resultatives and Constraints on Concealed Causatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Beth Levin
7 Deconstructing Internal Causation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Malka Rappaport Hovav

xiii
xiv Contents

8 Aspectual Differences Between Agentive and Non-agentive

Uses of Causative Predicates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Fabienne Martin

Part IV Syntactic and Semantic Aspects of Causation

9 Experiencers and Causation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
Artemis Alexiadou and Elena Anagnostopoulou
10 “Agent Exclusivity” Effects in Hebrew Nominalizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
Odelia Ahdout
11 Causees are not Agents. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349
Léa Nash
12 The Causative Component of Psychological Verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395
Edit Doron
13 Linguistic Perspectives in Causation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417
Isabelle Charnavel

Part V Philosophical Inquiries on Causation

14 Causes as Deviations from the Normal: Recent Advances in the
Philosophy of Causation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445
Georgie Statham
15 Counterfactuals and Causal Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463
Boris Kment
Contributors

Odelia Ahdout Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Artemis Alexiadou Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany
Elena Anagnostopoulou University of Crete, Rethymno, Greece
Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal Department of Hebrew Language; The Language,
Logic and Cognition Center, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Erika Bellingham Department of Linguistics, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY,
USA
Jürgen Bohnemeyer Department of Linguistics, University at Buffalo, Buffalo,
NY, USA
Nora Boneh Department of Linguistics; The Language, Logic and Cognition
Center, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Isabelle Charnavel Department of Linguistics, Harvard University, Cambridge,
MA, USA
William Croft University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA
Edit Doron† Department of Linguistics and Language, Logic and Cognition Center,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Neele Engelmann Department of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, Institute of
Psychology, University of Göettingen, Göttingen, Germany
Stephanie Evers Department of Linguistics, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY,
USA
York Hagmayer Department of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, Institute of
Psychology, University of Göettingen, Göettingen, Germany

xv
xvi Contributors

Christopher Hitchcock Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California

Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
Kazuhiro Kawachi National Defense Academy of Japan, Yokosuka, Japan
Boris Kment Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Beth Levin Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Fabienne Martin Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Alice Mitchell Institute for African Studies and Egyptology, University of Cologne,
Cologne, Germany
Léa Nash Department of Language Sciences, Université Paris Lumières-Saint
Denis/CNRS, Paris, France
Sang-Hee Park Department of Linguistics, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY,
USA
Malka Rappaport Hovav Department of Linguistics; Language, Logic and Cogni-
tion Center, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Georgie Statham Polonsky Academy Fellow, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute,
Jerusalem, Israel
Anastasia Stepanova Department of Linguistics, University at Buffalo, Buffalo,
NY, USA
Meagan Vigus University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA
 Part I
Perspectives on Causation
Chapter 1
Causation: From Metaphysics
to Semantics and Back

Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal and Nora Boneh

Abstract This paper examines reciprocal connections between the discussions

on causation in philosophy and in linguistics. Philosophers occasionally seek
insights from the linguistic literature on certain expressions, and linguists often
rely on philosophers’ analyses of causation, and assume that the relevant linguistic
expressions denote philosophical concepts related to causation. Through the study
of various semantic aspects of causative constructions, mainly targeting the nature
of the dependency encoded in various linguistic constructions and the nature of the
relata, this paper explores interfaces between the discussions in the two disciplines,
and at the same time points to significant differences in their objects of investigation,
in their methods and in their goals. Finally, the paper attempts to observe whether
the disciplinary line is maintained, i.e. whether or not it is the case that metaphysical
questions are examined as linguistic ones and vice versa.

Keywords Cause · Effect · Dependency · Counterfactuality · Causal Selection ·

Negation · Relata · Metaphysics · Causative constructions

E. A. Bar-Asher Siegal
Language, Logic and Cognition Center, The Department of Hebrew Language, Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
e-mail: [email protected]
N. Boneh ()
Language, Logic and Cognition Center, The Linguistics Department, Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 3

E. A. Bar-Asher Siegal, N. Boneh (eds.), Perspectives on Causation,
Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34308-8_1
4 E. A. Bar-Asher Siegal and N. Boneh

1.1 Introduction: Philosophical and Linguistic Discussions

on Causation

Discussions about the nature of causal relations stood at the heart of philosophical
inquiries since the days of the ancient Greek philosophers, most notably in the work
of Aristotle. Although, for Aristotle causality was not defined as a unitary notion, as
he developed the doctrine of the four causes,1 at least since the days of the British
empiricist David Hume, philosophers attempt to provide a unified account for what
stands behind the attribution of the terms “cause” and “effect” to two things.
For various philosophers, deliberations on the nature of causal relations, is
an attempt to characterize the intuition, broadly described as “the folk theory of
causation”, implicitly entertained by many (inter alia Lewis 2000; Menzies 2009).
Consequently, among the objects of their investigation are linguistic expressions
that seem to underlie these relations. In other words, such philosophers attempt to
provide a conceptual account, in non-causal terms, to all and only cases in which
people have an intuition to assert correctly that: “c is the cause of e” (or other causal
judgments).2 From a linguistic point of view, de facto such inquiries aim to identify
the semantics of such expressions.3
Putting it more broadly, one can identify reciprocal connections between the
discussions on causation in philosophy and in linguistics. Philosophers, on the one
hand, are often interested in the language of causal judgments and occasionally seek
insights from the linguistic literature on certain expressions, and linguists, on the
other hand, often borrow philosophers’ analyses of causation, and assume that the
relevant linguistic expressions denote such concepts. This paper explores various
interfaces between the discussions in the two disciplines, and at the same time
points to significant differences in their objects of investigation, in their methods
and in their goals. Finally, it attempts to observe whether the disciplinary line
is maintained, i.e. whether it might be the case that metaphysical questions are
examined as linguistic ones and vice versa.
Considering first the object of investigation, most philosophers take it to be “the
world” – as causal relations are between entities in the world. The metaphysics of
causation, generally speaking, depicts the structure of the world itself, so that it
will be one that hosts such causal relations (inter alia Hall & Paul 2013). Thus, a
prominent question is what the relata are in a causal relation. Approaches differ

1 Aristotle, in all likelihood, did not provide an account for causality in the sense that causation

was analyzed in the philosophical literature since Hume. For Aristotle causes are whatever answers
the question “why” and therefore his causes are various types of because-answers (see inter alia
Hocutt 1974). For a somewhat parallel approach from recent literature, see Skow (2016).
2 It is sufficient to mention examples from the last decade, such as Schaffer (2013: 49), Skow (2016:

26–27), and Hitchcock’s contribution to this volume.

3 An even more radical claim is that human knowledge of causality derives from “the linguistic

representation and application of a host of causal concepts.” (Anscombe 1981: 93; see also Psillos
2009).
1 Causation: From Metaphysics to Semantics and Back 5

with respect to the kinds of things the relata in causal relations (events, facts, tropes,
attributes etc.) are.4 Another central issue in philosophical accounts of causation,
which has some bearing on various issues that will be discussed in this paper, is
the question whether causation can be reduced to other more basic relations.5 For
some philosophers, each causal judgment has some suitable description in which
it is an instantiation of some lawful regularity (Davidson 1967), or they argue
that an account of causation must determine the logical dependencies between the
participants in such relations, such as e.g. necessity and sufficiency (Mackie 1965),
other types of dependencies such as counterfactuality (Lewis 1973a, b), probability
(Kvart 2004), or by revealing the physical events that stand behind such claims
(Dowe 2000).
In contrast, for linguists, the object of investigation is, for the most part, linguistic
expressions, which we will henceforth refer to as causative constructions (to be
defined below).6 These span overt causative verbs such as cause but also make,
allow, enable, let; connectives such as because (of), from, by, as a result of ; and
change of state verbs such as open, boil, which may or may not include what
are thought to be dedicated causative morphemes, and constructions involving
affected participants. The specific concern in each of these types of constructions
varies: whereas the goal of formulating the truth conditions of connectives and
overt causative verbs is fairly straightforward, pinpointing a presumed causative
component in change of state verbs is less trivial. With respect to these verbs, one
central point is to understand the regularity of derivation between a stative-like
expression and change of state verbs. The aim of such a discussion is to reveal
the role of the causative meaning component in the derivation (Haspelmath 1993;
Haspelmath et al. 2014; Doron 2003; Lundquist et al. 2016 among many others).7,8

4 For Davidson (1969), for example, the individuation of events derives from their participation in
causal relations.
5 See, Woodward (2003) and Carroll (2009) for non-reductionist approaches to causation.
6 Some linguists emphasize that causal expressions are not about actual causation in the world but

rather, about how it is psychologically construed. For example, based on this assumption Levin
and Rappaport Hovav (=LRH) propose a distinction between internal and external causation,
which cannot be accounted for in terms of classical analyses of causation (see inter alia Levin
& Rapaport Hovav 1994, 1995 et seq. and Rappaport Hovav’s contribution to this volume). It
is unclear, however, in a model-based approach to semantics, how the truth values of causative
sentences are determined, according to those who claim that these types of judgments should not
be evaluated against causal relations in the world.
7 In certain languages, in pairs of inchoatives and causatives, the former are marked. These are

cases, known in the literature as anticausatives (see in this book Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou,
Ahdout, Rappaport Hovav).
8 Linguists’ concerns in causation cover other levels of analyses besides the semantic one. One

central topic, where the relevance of causation became significant is with respect to issues
pertaining to argument realization mostly in dealing with the following two questions: A. Is
causation an or the organizing factor in the grammatical relations of the basic predication (Croft
1991 et seq., see also Croft & Vigus this book)? B. Is it reflected in specific types of the predicates’
arguments: whether there is a thematic role of CAUSER (e.g. Pesetsky 1995; Reinhart 2000; Doron
6 E. A. Bar-Asher Siegal and N. Boneh

Importantly, also within linguistics, the issue of the relata comes up, and views
on their nature diverge a great deal.9 It is not always clear what the criteria are in
linguistics for determining the nature of the relata, and, in fact, different approaches
derive from different motivations: some linguists motivate their choice by referring
to a philosophical conceptual analysis of causation (see Pylkkänen 2008, or the
contribution of Levin this volume). Others, especially those who take individuals to
be part of the causal relation, point to linguistic manifestations of causal judgments,
where more often than not nominal expressions (NPs/DPs) are the participants in
the actual linguistic expressions (see Doron 1999 and this volume; Reinhart 2000,
2002; Neeleman & van de Koot 2012).10 This approach, very often, comes with
a claim that linguistic causative expressions do not correlate with the way causal
relations are perceived from a philosophical perspective.
Crucially, a non-trivial assumption underlying the question of the relata in the
philosophical discussion is the issue of it embodying a binary relation between cause
and effect. Philosophers committed to the framework of the Structural Equation
Model (such as Pearl 2000; Yablo 2004; Woodward 2003 and Hitchcock this
volume) do not take the binary relation to hold metaphysically; Hitchcock goes on
to claim that the binary relation pertains to or stems from linguistically influenced
causal judgments. In the rest of the paper, we will not refer to this framework
directly, since much of the existent linguistic literature does not incorporate insights
stemming form it.11,12
In contrast, within linguistics, various scholars argue that, while conceptually,
causation involves a binary relation, it is not necessary for the linguistic expression

this volume); or whether there is, at the syntactic level, a designated functional head of CAUSE
(see discussions by Ahdout and Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou this volume).
9 In a superficial way, it is possible to mention the following options:

Cause Effect
Proposition Proposition (Dowty 1979)
Event Event (Pylkkänen 2008)
Individual Proposition (McCawley 1976)
Individual Event (Doron 2003; Neeleman & van de Koot 2012;
Reinhart 2000; Pesetsky 1995)
Individual Individual (Talmy 1976; Croft 1991)
10 Since Dowty (1979), it is acknowledged that there is a discrepancy between the grammatical

realization of the causer as a nominal phrase and the semantic facet. Accordingly, the individual
syntactically realized is seen as part of a causing event (see Croft & Vigus this volume)
11 For recent linguistic work building on this framework consider inter alia Bjorndahl & Snider

(2015), Baglini & Francez (2016), Nadathur & Lauer (2020) and Baglini & Bar-Asher Siegal
(forthcoming).
12 As noted by Hitchcock (this volume), one can identify the inspiration for the SEM approach

already in Mill’s observation that causality is always held between a set of conditions and an effect.
In this respect we will also be engaged in the current paper with this approach in the discussion in
Sect. 1.4 regarding Causal Selection. Another reason for not engaging with this approach is that
it is not a trivial matter what the principles are in constructing the relevant models (see inter alia
Halpern & Pearl 2005a, b; Hall & Paul 2013).
1 Causation: From Metaphysics to Semantics and Back 7

to represent the cause.13 At the same time, issue is taken with cases where there
seem to be more than two parts to the relation.14
With this background in place, this paper critically traces points of interaction
between the two disciplines, focusing on ways in which philosophical ideas were
brought to bear on linguistic work. At the same time, we seek to expand our
understanding of what in the philosophical discussion pertains to the linguistic realm
(in line with Hitchcock’s & Statham’s papers, in this volume).
We will illustrate this type of inquiry by exploring several facets of the inter-
pretative properties of linguistic constructions, some overtly encoding causation
via the verb cause and its kin, or the connective because, others covertly – such
as lexical causative verbs (change of state verbs, and caused activity verbs) or
Affected Participant constructions. In order to have a common denominator for
the discussion, we take linguistic Causative Constructions to be divided into three
parts:15

(i) a cause (c);

(ii) the effect of the cause (e); and
(iii) the dependency (D) between c and e
(1) [c] D [e]

Using this working definition, we examine the nature of the relation in (1) in
various constructions, by answering the questions that will be laid out in the next
section. It must be emphasized that “cause” (c) and “effect” (e) are used here loosely
in a pre-theoretical manner. Accordingly, the use of the term “causative” or the
division of the components to “cause” and “effect” neither indicates an assumption
that a construction denotes causal relations, nor does it commit to the nature of (c)
and (e). In fact, it is quite the opposite: we will use (c), (e) and D, in an uncommitted
manner, as it is our goal to understand their nature. We would like to examine to
what extent the nature of (c) and (e) is similar to what philosophers think about the
relata of the causal relation, and whether the philosophical accounts for causality
can provide better insights as to the nature of the D in these constructions.

13 Itwas argued that there is a set of intransitive verbs, designated anticausative verbs, that denote
an event affecting its subject, without a syntactic representation of the cause (Alexiadou et al. 2006,
and subsequent work; see also early work by Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995 for similar ideas).
14 This is particularly relevant for the analysis of psychological predicates and the distinction

between cause and Target/Subject Matter (Pesetsky 1995; Doron this volume, among others); but
also cases where agents and instruments appear together and bring about the effect (these cases are
extensively discussed by Croft 1991, also Croft & Vigus, this volume).
15 Cf. Bellingham et al. in this volume, who also compare between causative constructions. They

propose, however, a different approach as to what should be considered as a causative construction,

without holding received semantic preconceptions.
8 E. A. Bar-Asher Siegal and N. Boneh

In Sect. 1.2, we lay out the questions to be explored in the subsequent sections of
this paper; to anticipate, these questions seek to identify philosophical concepts rel-
evant for the linguistic analysis, the way they should be defined truth conditionally,
and to see whether all causative constructions underlie one and the same causative
concept. In turn, we also explore what in the philosophical metaphysical inquiry
pertains to the linguistic one. In the second part of the section, we provide a general
survey of the various causative constructions to be analyzed in the paper. Then,
in Sects 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5, we move to consider specific interpretative components
of D relating c & e. The focus of Sect. 1.3 is counterfactuality, central to the
philosophical discussion, also prevalent in linguistic treatments. In Sect. 1.4, we
put to the test the question of Causal Selection in linguistic constructions, and
compare how the various linguistic constructions pattern in this respect, observing
that besides counterfactuality, D in each type of construction has different properties
in singling out, or not, The Cause. Sect. 1.5 takes issue with negation, and through
this further examines the semantic properties of D and the relata: whether D is
asserted or not (1.5.1), and whether the relata (c) and (e) can be independently
negated, opening a discussion on whether the relata are event-like or individual-
like (Sects. 1.5.2, 1.5.3 and 1.5.3.1). Finally, Sect. 1.6 applies insights from the
previous sections to an additional causative construction – the Affected Participant
construction, where causation is not overtly encoded by any particular linguistic
material. Sect. 1.7 concludes the discussion.

1.2 Setting the Scene

1.2.1 Theoretical Questions and Their Background

As we explore the flow of ideas about causation between philosophy and linguistics,
we will focus on the following set of broad questions:
A. Can philosophical accounts of causation be relevant for linguistic analyses of
causal constructions? Taking a semantic point of view, we ask whether such
accounts can be “translated” to truth-conditions examining whether they provide
the accurate truth conditions to these expressions. From a syntactic point of
view, one may ask whether metaphysical accounts should put constraints on
the syntactic analysis of the relevant constructions, for example, by determining
the categorical nature of the relata.
B. Is there one all-encompassing causative meaning component underlying the
diverse linguistic phenomena, regardless of whether the marker of the causal
dependency is overt (e.g. cause, because) or covert (such as in lexical causative
verbs); or should there be different ones for the various constructions, possibly
correlating with the type of linguistic form?
1 Causation: From Metaphysics to Semantics and Back 9

C. As for the philosophical discussions on causation, we inquire whether they are

sensitive to the linguistic data they rely on; or whether the disciplinary borderline
between metaphysical questions and semantic ones is blurred.
A consequence of answering A positively often leads to answering Question B
by claiming, or at least assuming, that there is only one type of causative meaning
component for the diverse linguistic phenomena. Dowty (1979) is a good example
of an influential linguist who followed this path, as he adopted Lewis’ (1973a, b
et seq.) analysis of causation, and consequently took it almost for granted that
counterfactuality underlies the semantics of the various causal constructions. In
contrast, many linguists observe a strict disciplinary borderline, and assume that
although the concept of a causal relation is indeed relevant for the linguistic analysis,
its particular semantic nature can remain opaque. Accordingly, the component
CAUSE, either in the syntax or in the morphology, is taken to be an unanalyzable
semantic primitive (e.g. Morgan 1969; Lakoff 1970; Jackendoff 1972: 39; Levin
& Rappaport Hovav 1995 et seq.; Pylkkänen 2008). Yet a different approach is
represented by such scholars as Talmy (2000) and Marantz (2005), who argue, in
the context of verbs, each within a different framework, that causation is not part of
their lexical properties, or that other concepts are more relevant (see also Neeleman
& van de Koot 2012).
In the discussion bellow, we follow those who advocate semantic analyses
that are informed by the philosophical literature, and assume that Question A is
answered positively.
To set the stage, we turn now to introduce, in a somewhat simplified manner,
two prominent approaches to causal relations: the dependency account and the
production account (for a philosophical introduction of the two approaches to cau-
sation see Dowe 2000, and also Copley & Wolff 2014 for application in linguistics
and psychology). According to the former, a basic conception of causation was
to perceive Cause and Effect as related according to the following (from the 70s
to now: Shibatani 1976b and see also Comrie 1981; Dixon 2000; Talmy 2000;
Escamilla 2012):16
(a) Dependency between events – the causal relation is held between two events.
(b) Temporal precedence – the cause must precede effect.17,18
(c) Counterfactuality – the dependency is defined in the following way: “had the
cause not occurred, the effect would not have occurred either.”

16 Cf. Neeleman & van de Koot (2012) who argue that although this is indeed the conceptual
representation of causal relations, languages do not encode such a relation. It is unclear, however,
how their alternative concept of Crucial Contributing Factor (CCF) can be established without
recourse to some notion of causation. See also Martin (this volume) for the possibility that
languages syntactically represent causal relations in different ways.
17 For Lewis (1979) the temporal asymmetry of causal dependence derives from his counterfactual

analysis in terms of closeness between possible worlds (cf. Anscombe 1981).

18 The assumption that the cause must precede the effect goes back to Hume (A Treatise of Human

Nature, §1.3.14).
10 E. A. Bar-Asher Siegal and N. Boneh

This understanding of causation, to a large extent, follows Lewis’ (1973a, b)

counterfactual theory of causation (see Sect. 1.3), and was adopted whole-sale from
philosophers without engaging in a fundamental discussion (but see Dowty 1979:
106–109 and Eckardt 2000).
The latter way to conceptualize causation assumes that some quality of the cause
produces the effect. This approach emphasizes the intuition that the cause brings
about the effect. While, since Hume, there is skepticism about theories of production
as they seem to entail an unanalyzable causal primitive, various philosophers,
linguists and psychologists developed such theories, according to which causation
conceptually derives from people’s representations of transfer of force and spatial
relations. Within linguistics, this approach can be traced back to Talmy’s (1976,
2000) work as well as to Croft’s (1991 et seq.), see also the representation of
this approach in this volume in the following papers: Bellingham et al., Croft and
Vigus and Hagmayer and Engelmann. Causation, accordingly, is viewed from a
conceptual or cognitive perspective, where the purpose in the linguistic literature
is to understand how it is reflected in the grammar, or serves as an organizational
mechanism for argument realization (for more recent literature see Wolff 2007;
Copley & Harley 2015; Copley et al. 2015 and Wolff & Thorstand 2016).19
This paper, for the most part, examines different aspects of the dependency
approach, with occasional notes to the literature from the production approach,
when it will be directly relevant for the examined topics. The main reason for this
choice is that the three respects in which causation is examined in this paper –
counterfactuality, causal selection and negation of causation – are more easily
applicable within the dependency approach, than in the force-dynamic one.
Question B, regarding the unitary concept, is quite complex. Indeed, in the
history of the linguistic literature, one can repeatedly identify the underlying
assumption of a unitary analysis, just to mention a few examples: An early stab on
the question of causation in linguistics was provided in the framework of Generative
Semantics. In this framework, an attempt was made to claim that underlyingly
the semantic primitive CAUSE and the overt verb cause are in fact one and the
same thing. They have the same entailed propositions and the same conditions of
temporality, dependency and counterfactuality hold for both (see also van Valin
2005: 38). Syntactically, evidence was adduced in favor of event decomposition
(McCawley 1968 and Morgan 1969). Similarly, when Pesetsky (1995) introduced
CAUSER as a thematic role, he assumed that its underlying syntax is identical to
that of the overt preposition because of ; Alexiadou et al.’s (2006, and later work)
propose a similar structure to verbs with a NP/DP causer as their subject and the
participant with preposition from. In a different context, recently, Copley et al.

19 Withinthe same line of thought, various philosophers provide accounts for causation that do not
reduce causation to some dependency defined merely by logical relations. Among those there are
production accounts (Hall 2004), which aims to capture the notion of “bringing about” affiliated
with causation, and causal processes which focus on the role of physical processes as those that
define causal relations (Salmon 1997; Dowe 2000).
1 Causation: From Metaphysics to Semantics and Back 11

(2015) attempt to provide a unified analysis of verbs and connectives through force-
dynamic theories.
As noted earlier, one can identify this assumption concerning the unitary analysis
for causal relation as an inheritance from the philosophical tradition. Recently,
however, philosophers proposed various theories of causal pluralism (Hitchcock
2003; Hall 2004; Psillos 2009). Similarly, within cognitive studies, Waldmann &
Hagmayer (2013), inter alia, indicate that people have a pluralistic conception of
causation, and different judgments rely on different types of concept of causal
relations. Traces of this tendency can be observed also in recent linguistic studies.
Copley & Wolff (2014) suggest that different types of causative constructions should
be analyzed in light of different approaches to causation (e.g. causal connectives
are best captured as a dependency, whereas the semantics of causal verbs is best
captured in the framework of production based theories). Similarly, Lauer (2010),
Martin (2018), Bar-Asher Siegal & Boneh (2019) and Nadathur & Lauer (2020)
argue that the semantic content of D is different in various constructions, tracing
whether the main verb encodes a necessary and/or a sufficient condition.
Finally, we wish to conclude this section with an example for how philosophical
analyses can fruitfully inform linguistic ones. We, pre-theoretically, characterized
causative constructions by the D that stands between (c) and (e). However, linguists
do not always distinguish between causation and other types of dependencies,
such as grounding,20 logical dependence, teleology21 or reasoning, which are
kept distinct in philosophy. Nevertheless, several studies did point out that not
all causative constructions are dedicated to the expression of just and only causal
relations. For example, connectives as well as the verb cause give rise to situations
where temporal precedence and counterfactuality do not simultaneously hold with
dependency:22

20 For an introduction of the notion of grounding see Correia & Schneider (2012). Schaffer (2016:
96) lists the following differences between causation and grounding:
• causation can be non-deterministic, grounding must be deterministic;
• causation can only connect distinct (grounding-disconnected) portions of reality; and
• causation can be non-well-founded, grounding must be well-founded.
21 In discussions on the philosophy of action, for various philosophers, such as Davidson (1963, and

more broadly in 1980), teleological explanations are themselves analyzable as causal explanations.
Others, such as Taylor (1964), argue that they should be analyzed in non-causal terms.
22 Another use of because is when it is used to indicate the source of the speaker’s knowledge, as

in sentences like They are getting married, because I saw an engagement ring on her finger. We
wish to thank Larry Horn for mentioning this type of because; we do not refer to such cases as they
may involve a different kind of causal relations. Cf. Charnavel (this volume and related work) on
similar uses of since.
12 E. A. Bar-Asher Siegal and N. Boneh

(2) a. A kangaroo is a marsupial because it has a pouch. (Dowty 1979: 132b)

b. Mary’s living nearby causes John to prefer this neighborhood. (Dowty
1979: 132c)
c. The floor is black because of the ants that might infest it. (adopted from
Maienborn & Herdtfelder 2015)
This paper proposes a preliminary study that attempts to critically consider
points of meeting between the discussions in philosophy and linguistics, and also
where they part ways. We will do so by exploring differences between various
causative constructions, as we propose a preliminary semantic characterization of
some of them. Throughout Sects. 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 and 1.6 we will explore differences
in the semantics of various causative constructions, and examine the source for
these differences. More specifically, we will ask whether the differences in the
semantics indicate that the various constructions encode different causal concepts
(cf. Thomason 2014) or whether they can be accounted in other ways such as
different syntactic structures.
The questions evoked in C are general in their nature, and require a vast and
careful investigation. In the paper, we will refer to C mainly in Sect. 1.4, and also in
the concluding discussion.
The next section introduces several types of causative constructions that we then
compare in the subsequent Sects. 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5.

1.2.2 Causative Constructions

We center on three central types of causative constructions in English and Hebrew.

Hebrew is useful as it enables to widen the discussion of lexical causatives
(Sect. 1.2.2.3), with its overt morphology absent in English. Our categorization
is classified according to a basic syntactic characterization, and it is purely for
presentational purposes (for typologies of cross-linguistic causative constructions
see Shibatani 1976a; Comrie 1981: 158–177; Song 1996; Dixon 2000, among
others). In Sect. 1.6, we add another construction to the discussion: the Affected
Participant construction, available both in Hebrew and in English. This will enable
us to examine further the semantic properties of causal constructions in the absence
of an overt D.

1.2.2.1 Overt Causative Verbs

Under this category fall verbs such as cause, make, enable, allow, let, that seemingly
express causal relations, where the subject is the cause and the complement of the
verb is the effect.
1 Causation: From Metaphysics to Semantics and Back 13

(3) a. [c The neighbor/the music] caused / made / enabled [e the kids

(to) dance].
b. [c ha-šxena/ha-musika] garma / ifšera [e la-yeladim lirkod].
The-neighbor/the-music made / let the children dance
Such overt verbs are used most often in philosophical discussions about causal
relations, assuming that they are true in a given circumstance only when (c) is the
cause of (e) (inter alia Anscombe 1981; Hitchcock & Knobe 2009; Schaffer 2013,
also Statham this volume).
A few linguistic analyses of these verbs, focusing mostly on the verb cause,
provide a semantic analysis of a counterfactual dependency (inter alia Abbott
1974; Eckardt 2000; Lauer 2010). Others have noted on the role of causation in
the meaning of other verbs, such as implicative verbs (Nadathur 2015; Baglini
& Francez 2016). Recent accounts of such verbs, assuming semantic analyses of
causation as forces, argue for two interacting forces or tendencies. They propose
that verbs vary with respect to whether the force is associated with the agent, as
is the case with the verb cause, or with the patient, as is the case with the verb
enable (Talmy 2000; Wolff & Song 2003; Wolff 2007; Copley et al. 2015). They
take the availability of such distinctions to be a theoretical advantage for a force-
dynamics analysis of causation. It seems necessary, however, to examine whether
these are indeed differences in the semantics of the verbs, or whether the differences
between the semantics of these verbs should be relegated to a variety of pragmatic
implications associated with them.23 The focus in this paper is mostly on the verbs
cause in English, and its Hebrew rough equivalent garam.

1.2.2.2 Connectives

Connectives are conjunctions such as because, since, for; and prepositions such
as because (of), from-PPs, by-PPs. Some of them come as complex nominal
expressions, such as as a result of, out of, added as adjuncts introducing the cause
to a main clause, expressing the effect. Whereas the latter two introduce a nominal
expression, because and since can also connect two clauses. These elements have
been studied from various perspectives (inter alia Alexiadou et al. 2006; Charnavel

23 According to Wolff (2003), ENABLE is associated with the tendency of the patient for the result
and with lack of opposition between the effector and the patient, while this tendency is absent in
the case of CAUSE, as there is an inherent opposition between the effector and the patient. Such
a dichotomy must assume that these two verbs are in a complementary distribution, and therefore
cannot describe the same state-of-affairs. However, it seems to be the case that often the distinction
is merely with respect to the way speakers favor the result. Thus, one can imagine the following two
sentences describing the same situation, (i) by supporter of the strike and (ii) by its opponent:
(i) The decision of the party enabled the strike.
(ii) The decision of the party caused the strike.
14 E. A. Bar-Asher Siegal and N. Boneh

2018 et seq. and this volume; Copley et al. 2015; Degand 2000; Johnston 1994;
Kadmon & Landman 1993: 389–398; Maienborn & Hertfelder 2015, 2017; Solstad
2010; Sweetser 1990).

(4) a. [e The kids danced] because of [c the music].

b. [e The door opened] because of / from [c the wind].
c. [e She lost this case] because of [c the witness’ death].
d. [e She died] from [c drinking too much water].
e. [e The kids danced] because [c they were happy].
f. [e You are biting your thumb at me] because [c you want to insult me]
(Davidson 1963: 688).

(5) a. [e ha-delet niftexa] biglal / me- [c ha-ruax].

The-door opened because / from the-wind
b. [e hi meta] biglal / me- [c štiyat mayim].
She died because / from drinking water
The conjunction because, as noted earlier, can also indicate reasoning, as is
the case in (4f). An explanation of an intentional action in terms of its motives
and reasons is different from expressing a causal relation. Together with what has
been exemplified in (2), clearly the connective because does not denote a causal
relation stricto sensu. Indeed, various philosophers have noted that because is the
preliminary way to convey grounding dependencies (see Schneider 2011; Correia &
Schnieder 2012: 22–24, Schaffer 2016: 84, Skow 2016).24 However, the linguistic
literature often includes it among the causal expressions and analyzes it as such (see,
for example, Charnavel this volume and related work). Nevertheless, the preposition
from has been often taken to be the ultimate linguistic means to introduce the
cause in a relation between entities (Alexiadou et al. 2006, 2015; also this volume;
Ahdout this volume). Presumably, this is related to the more restricted distribution
of from-PPs, in comparison to the connective because, being mainly attested with
verbs lacking an agentive or causative external argument such as unaccusatives and
statives.
Differences in meaning between the two connectives have been discussed by
linguists (Maienborn & Herdtfelder 2015, 2017), and are nicely revealed by the
asymmetry in the inference relations they give rise to, as demonstrated in (6):

(6) a. Maria is tired from the trip. ⇒ Maria is tired because of the trip.
b. Maria is tired because of the trip.  Maria is tired from the trip.

24 It
is worth noting that Aristotle’s so-called four causes belong to various notions of reasoning
and explanation, and it has been noted that in fact he spoke about four becauses (see Vlastos 1969:
293ff.)
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