ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a new analysis of the Japanese causative construction. Japanese causative constructions have attracted much attention in studies of causatives. The chapter also presents another type of lexical causatives in Japanese. The intransitive-based causatives can mark the lower subject with the dative case instead of with the expected accusative case. In most cases, the transitive-based causatives uniformly mark the Causer with nominative case, the Causee with dative, and the direct object of the original transitive verb with accusative. Thus the difference between the wo-causatives and the ni-causatives has been observed mainly in terms of case marking and semantic interpretation. The distinction between wo-causatives and ni-causatives is not made in terms of phrase structure. Causatives have been analyzed from a number of points of view. In early transformational approaches, Japanese causatives are analyzed in a way similar to the periphrastic causatives of English.
