ABSTRACT
The last chapter was devoted to a determination of the thematic and syntactic structure of French causative sentences. There, it was argued that the word order, clitic placement, and Case-marking facts found in this construction can be accommodated by a verbal government chain analysis which strictly adheres to the principles of standard Theta Theory. In the present chapter, I will focus on the semantic interpretation associated with one particular type of causative sentence. As was mentioned in chapter 2, many speakers of French, in particular certain speakers from southern France (Authier and Reed, 1991: 199), Quebec, and Ontario (see e.g. Y.-C. Morin (1980: 205)), accept sentences in faire ‘to get/make’ in which the morphological case of the clitic corresponding to the embedded subject does not match that of its nominal counterpart, as illustrated in (Id) below.1
