ABSTRACT
Causative contructions have been a very fruitful area of syntactic research over the last fifteen years. French causative constructions in particular have received much attention from various theoretical perspectives. Important studies include Ruwet (1972), Perlmutter and Postal (1974), Kayne (1975). Radford (1978). Aissen (1979), Rouveret and Vergnaud (1980), Quicoli (1980, 1981, 1984), Postal (1981, 1983a, 1984). Zubizarreta (1982). Faucomier (1983), Rosen (1983, 1984a), Burzio (1986), Gibson and Raposo (1986), Davies and Rosen (1988). Within RG, the most comprehensive analysis of causative constructions cross-linguistically is due to Gibson and Raposo (1986). Their typological study includes an account of French causatives which appeals to both universal principles and a language-particular rule. In essence, they claim that causative constructions obey a language-particular principle governing the embedded subject and a universal principle governing all other arguments of the embedded clause.
