Causative

In linguistics, a causative is a valency-increasing operation that indicates that a subject either causes someone or something else to do or be something or causes a change in state of a non-volitional event. Normally, it brings in a new argument, A, into a transitive clause, with the original subject S becoming the object O.
All languages have ways to express causation but differ in the means. Most, if not all, languages have specific or lexical causative forms. Some languages also have morphological devices that change verbs into their causative forms or change adjectives into verbs of becoming. Other languages employ periphrasis, with control verbs, idiomatic expressions or auxiliary verbs. There tends to be a link between how "compact" a causative device is and its semantic meaning.
The normal English causative verb or control verb used in periphrasis is make rather than cause. Linguistic terms are traditionally given names with a Romance root, which has led some to believe that cause is more prototypical. While cause is a causative, it carries some additional meaning and is less common than make. Also, while most other English causative verbs require a to complement clause, in Modern English make does not require one, at least when it is not being used in the passive voice. The bare infinitive's near-uniformity of use in this context is, however, a development in Modern English; contrast, e.g., Early Modern English He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.

Terminology

Many authors have written extensively on causative constructions and have used a variety of terms, often to talk about the same things.
S, A, and O are terms used in morphosyntactic alignment to describe arguments in a sentence. The subject of an intransitive verb is S, the agent of a transitive verb is A, and the object of a transitive is O. These terms are technically not abbreviations for "subject", "agent", and "object", though they can usually be thought of that way. P is often used instead of O in many works.
The term underlying is used to describe sentences, phrases, or words that correspond to their causative versions. Often, this underlying sentence may not be explicitly stated. For example, for the sentence "'John made Bill drive the truck'", the underlying sentence would be Bill drove the truck. This has also been called the base situation.
A derived sentence would be the causativized variant of the underlying sentence.
The causer is the new argument in a causative expression that causes the action to be done. The causer is the new argument brought into a derived sentence. In the example sentence above, John is the causer.
The causee is the argument that actually does the action in a causativized sentence. It is usually present in both the underlying and derived sentences. Bill is the causee in the above example.

Devices

There are various ways of encoding causation, which form somewhat of a continuum of "compactness."

Lexical

Lexical causatives are common in the world's languages. There are three kinds of lexical causatives, the unifying factor being that the idea of causation is part of the semantics of the verb itself.
On the surface, lexical causatives look essentially the same as a regular transitive verb. There are a few reasons why this is not true. The first is that transitive verbs generally do not have an intransitive counterpart but lexical causatives do. The semantics of the verbs show the difference as well. A regular transitive verb implies a single event while a lexical causative implies a realization of an event:
Sentence is judged ungrammatical because it goes against the successful event implied by the verb melt.

One word

Some languages, including English, have ambitransitive verbs like break, burn or awake, which may either be intransitive or transitive
These are split into two varieties: agentive and patientive ambitransitives. Agentive ambitransitives include verbs such as walk and knit because the S of the intransitive corresponds to the A of the transitive. For example:
This type of ambitransitive does not show a causative relationship.
For patientive ambitransitives, such as trip and spill, the S of the intransitive corresponds to the O of the transitive:
These are further divided into two more types, based on speakers' intuition. Some, like spill in, are primarily transitive and secondarily intransitive. Other verbs like this include smash and extend. Other verbs, such as trip in go the other way: they are primarily intransitive and secondarily transitive.
Other examples of this type include explode, melt, dissolve, walk, and march. It is this type of ambitransitive verb that is considered a causative. This is given some anecdotal evidence in that to translate above into languages with morphological causatives, a morpheme would need to be attached to the verb.
Lexical causatives are apparently constrained to involving only one agentive argument. Semantically, the causer is usually marked as the patient. In fact, it is unlikely whether any language has a lexical causative for verbs such as swim, sing, read, or kick.

Irregular stem change

English fell can be thought of as a lexical causative of fall, exemplifying this category. This is considered a lexical change because it is not at all productive. If it were productive, it would be an internal change morphological causative.

Two words

English has verb pairs such as rise and raise, eat and feed, see and show where one is essentially the causative correspondent of the other.
These pairs are linked semantically by various means, usually involving translation. For example, burn as in "The grass burned" would translate as awa- in Yimas, while burn as in "I burned the grass" would translate as ampu- in Yimas.

Morphological

There are eight different morphological processes by which a causative may be marked, roughly organized by compactness:

Process	Basic Verb	Causative Form	Language
internal change	tìkti	táikyti	Lithuanian
tone change	nɔ̂	nɔ̄	Lahu
consonant repetition			Gulf Arabic
vowel lengthening			Kashmiri
reduplication			Javanese
prefix			Amharic
suffix	-kam-	-kam-isa-	Kʼicheʼ
circumfix			Georgian

Within morphological causatives, this degree of compactness bears an important variable when considering the semantics of the two processes. For example, mechanisms that do not change the length of the word are shorter than those that lengthen it. Of those that lengthen it, shorter changes are more compact than longer.
Verbs can be classified into four categories, according to how susceptible they are to morphological causativization:

Inactive intransitives
Middle/ingestive verbs
Active intransitives
Transitive verbs

This hierarchy has some exceptions, but it does generally hold true. For example, given a text of Guarani, only about 16% of causatives apply to transitives. For some languages, it may not apply to transitive verbs productively and may only apply to verbs that denote abstract action or consumption of food. Additionally, within Athabaskan family, all languages can causativize inactive intransitives, but not all of them can causativize active intransitives or even transitives.

Two verbs in one predicate

A number of languages involve a form of analytic causative that involves two verbs in a single predicate, such as French, Spanish, Italian and Catalan. For example, when French faire is used as a causative, the causee noun phrase cannot occur between it and the next verb.
Unlike most other Romance languages, Portuguese uses a periphrastic construction like that of English, discussed below.
Kiowa uses a similar mechanism. Verbs can be compounded with the transitive verb ɔ́m to create a causative:

Periphrastic constructions

Some languages use a periphrastic construction to express causation and typically include two verbs and two clauses. English causatives prototypically use make in the main clause with the lexical verb in a subordinate clause, as in "I made him go."
Other languages, such as Persian, have the opposite syntax: the causative is in a subordinating clause and the main verb is in the main clause, as in the following example from Macushi:
Canela-Krahô has a combination of the two in which the causee is marked twice, once in each clause:
Portuguese also has a periphrastic construction like that of English but unlike most other Romance languages:
Analytic causatives are sometimes not considered to be valency increasing devices, but they can semantically be interpreted as such.

Semantics

A language may have one or more different formal mechanisms for expression of causation. For languages with only one, the semantic range is broad. For those with multiple, there is always a semantic difference between the two. R. M. W. Dixon breaks down these semantic differences into 9 parameters, involving the verb itself, the causee, and the causer:
These parameters are not mutually exclusive. Many causative constructions involve the semantics of two or more parameters. However, the difference between the causatives in a language most likely will be distinguished by one of the parameters.