Analytical causatives: Structural and semantic characteristics of the predicate construction

Abstract

The main subject in this research is to analyse analytical causatives in Serbian, or analytical predicate constructions with causative meaning. Apart from pointing out the basic typological characteristics of causative constructions, the paper highlights two main topics which deserve our attention, namely the structural features of the predicate construction and the semantic resources of the controlling verb, which performs the operator function. Depending on the grammatical and semantic characteristics of the governing verb, in a certain number of models the function of the causative operator is taken over by nouns. The results we discussed are based on examples from Serbian.