Causality and modality: A case study on Teochew periphrastic causatives

. Many linguistics works have adopted the CAUSE operator to analyze causal relations. However, recent studies have gradually converged on the idea that a denotation like CAUSE( e , e’ ) is not sophisticated enough to capture complex causal-ities encoded in linguistic structures, echoing long-time discussions on causation in the field of philosophy. This study supports this view by working on the plural instan-tiations of causation encoded in five periphrastic causative constructions in Teochew, an understudied Southern Min language. I demonstrated causality notions encoded in Teochew causatives differ in four dimensions: (i) direct vs. indirect (temporal, spatial, intermediary agent), (ii) deterministic vs. probabilistic (in terms of the actuality entailment of the caused event), (iii) attitude-neutral vs. attitude-bearing (benefac-tive/adversative) and (iv) permissive vs. non-permissive. I provide a sublexical modal analysis paired with event semantics to capture these complexities, aiming to replace the monolithic CAUSE event linker and to show most of the causal complexities result from different flavors of sublexical modality encoded in the causative verbs.

1. Introduction.Philosophers have been long interested in the nature of causality.However, there is still no consensus despite countless treatments throughout the history of philosophy (Beebee et al. 2009).In contrast, linguists relied heavily on the monolithic CAUSE operator (Dowty 1979) to formalize causal meanings encoded in human languages.However, in the same spirit as 'causal pluralism' (see Godfrey-Smith (2009) for a review), some recent linguistic studies have proposed some new theoretical tools to capture the complex causal relations (e.g., Kaufmann 2013;Copley & Harley 2015;Martin 2018;Baglini & Bar-Asher Siegal 2020;Nadathur & Lauer 2020).Similar to discussions in the field of philosophy, such research can be divided into two groups.One is to focus on the ontological/conceptual nature of causation, on which most philosophical works concentrate; the other is to assume a single concept of causation with plural instantiations in the same spirit as the 'amiable jumble' criteria in Skyrms (1984).This study contributes to the second group of research.
The empirical domain of this study is five periphrastic causatives in an understudied language called Teochew (Southern Min, Sinitic), which have the same 'causer-causative verbcausee-predicate' surface structure but different causative verbs (1).Among them, the bun-causative is ambiguous between a 'courtesy' reading and a 'permissive' reading (1d-1e); in this paper, I treat them as different causatives with syncretic causative verbs.One natural question to ask is, 'Why does one language adopt so many different causative verbs in the same surface structure to express the causality notion, a pattern also observed in languages other than Teochew?'.The most intuitive answer is that causality encoded in the above periphrastic causative constructions are different from each other, realized in different causative verb forms.The next question is, 'How much do they differ?'.In the rest of this paper, I will show they differ at least in four dimensions: (i) direct vs. indirect (temporal, spatial, intermediary agent) (Section 3), (ii) deterministic vs. probabilistic (Section 4), (iii) attitude-neutral vs. benefactive/adversative (Section 5) and (iv) permissive vs. non-permissive (Section 6).I will provide a modal analysis paired with event semantics to capture all these complexities, arguing the monolithic CAUSE event linker is not sophisticated enough, and showing most of the causal complexities result from different flavors of sublexical modality encoded in the causative verbs.
2. Some basics.First, all Teochew causatives are bi-eventive.This is evidenced by the grammaticality of using independent and semantically contrastive manner adverbs meme 'quickly' and manman 'slowly' to modify the causing event and the caused event in the format of 'causermeme-mue/k@/hai/bun/bun-causee-manman-predicate'.Second, these Teochew periphrastic causatives have different selectivity when it comes to the embedded predicates (Table 1; examples omitted due to space limit).Third, the animacy of the causer and causee also differs across different causatives (Table 1; examples omitted due to space limit).
3. Dimension I: (in)directness.Linguists usually differentiate two subtypes of causative constructions, 'direct causatives' vs. 'indirect causatives'.There are two uses of terms for this distinction.The first is structurally defined as 'lexical causative' (direct) vs. 'productive/ periphrastic/ morphosyntactic causative' (indirect) (cf. Fodor 1970;Shibatani 1976;McCawley 1978;De-Lancey 1984;Wolff 2003).The other is semantically defined in terms of the closeness between the cause and the result (e.g., Nedjalkov & Silnitsky 1973;Levin & Rapport Hovav 1999) or between the participants in a causal chain, i.e., whether the causal chain allows an intermediary agent (e.g., Masica 1976).There are two positions in the literature trying to connect these two uses of terms.One position holds that the 'lexical causative' is more 'direct' in terms of interpretation (cf.Shibatani & Prashant 2002); the other believes such a connection does not exist, i.e., a 'lexical causative' can also be semantically 'indirect' (e.g., Neeleman & van de Koot 2012;Ramchand 2014).All Teochew causatives in this study are periphrastic, i.e., the structural variable is controlled so that they can serve as an interesting testing case for these two positions.I will show Causatives mue-caus.k@-caus.hai-caus.bun-caus.bun-caus.
Table 1.Some basic differences between Teochew periphrastic causatives that causal (in)directness is more complex than what was discussed in the literature, supporting the delinking of connections between structural and semantic (in)directness.
First, when it comes to temporal relations, most linguistics studies adopt the following 3 logical possible temporal relations between two events: (i) posteriority (e 1 follows e 2 ), (ii) simultaneity (e 1 overlaps with e 2 ) and (iii) anteriority (e 1 precedes e 2 ).However, we know some sentences of natural language seem to describe events using extended temporal periods, and such periods can be regarded as comprising continuous stretches of instances of time.Therefore, 'temporal relations among intervals are more diverse than those among instants' (Kuhn & Portner 2002).Based on these, Kuhn & Portner (2002) lists 13 logically possible relations that an interval A can bear to the fixed interval B (see Table 2).I test whether each of them is compatible with different Teochew causatives with different embedded predicates shown in Table 1.Second, when it comes to testing the spatial relation, I use d@ngdio 'on the spot' to modify the caused event, aiming for a proximal/direct spatial relation, and use do bang lai 'inside the room' and do bang duakao 'outside the room' to modify the causing event and the caused event respectively for a distal/indirect spatial relation.Finally, I test whether each causative is felicitous under a context where an intermediary agent exists in the causal chain.All the results are summarized in Table 2 (example omitted due to space limit).
As we can see, even though all Teochew causatives are 'indirect' in the structural sense, they are compatible with different '(in)direct' causal event structural interpretations.This serves as a counterexample to the structural-interpretative (in)directness correlation argued by Shibatani & Prashant (2002) and as a new piece of empirical evidence to support Neeleman & van de Koot (2012) and Ramchand (2014) in dissociating these two kinds of '(in)directness'.Besides, three subdimensions of '(in)directness' do not line up across five periphrastic causatives, indicating correlations between time, space and mediation do not seem to exist.That is to say, interpretative '(in)directness' should be defined in terms of a two/three-subdimensional way, i.e., event (both temporal and spatial) and event participant.This contrasts Ramchand (2014), which argues that a participant-based causal relation deviates from an event-based one.
I follow Deal (2009) for denotations of spatial relations (proximal: ∼ sp ; distal: As for those for an intermediate agent, one natural question to ask is that, given it is an event participant, is it possible that its existence indicates the existence of another event other than the causing and '(In)directness' (e 2 : causing event; e 1 : the caused even) mue-caus.k@-caus.hai-caus.bun-caus.bun-caus.
Table 2. '(In)direct' causality in each Teochew causative the caused ones?The fact that more than two manner adverbs, temporal modifications or spatial modifications are disallowed in each causative shows a third event does not exist.Therefore, I adopt a mereological approach (cf.Link 1983Link , 1998;;Bach 1986;Krifka 1992) to encode the intermediate agent in the causing event e 2 .The lexical semantics of each causative can be represented as in ( 2), where the temporal, spatial and participant relations are encoded explicitly.By not specifying the spatial relation and whether there exists an intermediate AGENT, I assume this causative is neutral in terms of these two subdimensions of (in)directness.
( ∧P(e 1 ) (to be revised) 4. Dimension II: actuality entailment.Since Dowty (1979), Pustejovsky (1995) and Higginbotham (2000), the CAUSE operator based on the 'counterfactual theory' in Lewis (1973) has been widely adopted to represent the causal links in a causal chain.However, probabilistic causation, where the actuality of the caused event is not entailed, poses a challenge to this approach.1Teochew periphrastic causatives also demonstrate this property, showing a deterministic (with the actuality entailment of result) vs. probabilistic (without the actuality entailment of result) contrast.More specifically, while the mue 'make'-causative and the hai 'hurt'-causative are deterministic causatives, the other three causatives, in contrast, do not entail the actuality of the caused event.Three groups of evidence support this conclusion, where both simplex predicates and VV compounds are used as embedded predicates.
First, it is felicitous to negate the caused event in the k@ 'give'-causative and the bun/bun 'separate'-causative but not the other two causatives.Second, in a similar spirit, the second group of diagnostic is to test whether these causatives can be paraphrased into resultative constructions, i.e., serial verb constructions (3) and V-gao 'arrive'-construction (4).As is shown below, the answer is yes for the mue/hai-causative but not the k@/bun/bun-causative.
I adopt the formal framework on modality in Kratzer (1977Kratzer ( , 1981Kratzer ( , 1991) ) and combine it with the 'Modal Component Hypothesis' (Koenig & Davis 2001) for analysis purpose.Given the causees in Teochew probabilistic k@ 'give'-causative and bun/bun 'separate'-causatives can only be [+animate] (Table 1), I assume these three causative verbs k@/bun/bun each encodes a universal sublexical volitional modality (Portner 2009) with a circumstantial modal base and a stereotypical ordering source.In contrast, the deterministic causative verbs mue 'make' and hai 'hurt' each sub-lexically encodes a universal metaphysical modality (Portner 2009) with a metaphysical modal base and a circumstantial ordering source.As is shown in the semantics of 'probabilistic/deterministic' causatives in Teochew (5), I get rid of the CAUSE operator (Dowty 1979).Instead, in the same spirit of Portner (1998), I assume a modality-linked causal relation, where the caused event is connected to the causing event in a way that it is treated as the final part of the causing event developing along certain courses.
Based on these, the lexical semantics of each causative verb can be further revised into (6), where the causal relation is denoted by modal semantics.5. Dimension III: benefactive/adversative.The third dimension these Teochew periphrastic causatives differ is whether they encode the speaker's attitude and are interpreted as a 'benefactive/adversative' causative.
In the literature, 'adversative/adversity causative' has been long associated with Japanese lexical causatives (e.g., Oehrle & Hiroko 1981;Miyagawa 1989;Harley 1996;Pylkkanen 2008).More specifically, in Japanese lexical causatives with an adversative interpretation, the nominative argument is interpreted as an affected argument of the event described by the main verb and it has a possession relation with the accusative argument.Interestingly, Teochew hai-causative also demonstrates a similar 'adversative' interpretation, though slightly different: the causee is adversely affected by the caused event, and the causer is the one to be blamed for causing it.2Even more interestingly, Teochew bun-causative serves as a contrasting case to the hai-causative, being interpreted as a 'benefactive' causative, where the causee is a beneficiary and the causer is one to be given credit to.
In other words, Teochew periphrastic causatives exhibit a contrast in terms of whether they encode the speaker's attitude or not: while the mue/k@/bun-causative is neutral, the hai/bun-causative bears the speaker's attitude.Four pieces of evidence support this.First, the 'benefactive/adversative' interpretation exists even when the event participants, i.e., the causer and causee, hold a contrastive attitude, suggesting the attitude reading comes from the speaker.Second, Teochew marks the speaker's attitude in the form of clause-final perfective markers: o (neutral/positive) and ku (negative).Misuse of aspectual markers is regarded as being impolite or ruthless.The hai-causative is incompatible with o but compatible with ku, while the bun-causative is compatible with o but not ku.The other three causatives can co-occur with both.Third, Teochew sentence-final confirming yes/no question marker ho can only occur in sentences indicating the neutral or positive attitude of the speaker.It is incompatible with the hai-causative but compatible with the other four causatives.Finally, aodai! is an emotional interjection used to indicate a strong positive attitude or appreciation towards an event that the speaker views as a morally good action.It is compatible with the bun-causative but not the hai-causative, and its acceptability with the other three causatives is relatively lower.
In the same spirit as previous discussions on attitude predicates (e.g., Hintikka 1961;Karttunen 1974;Heim 1992;Giorgi 1997;Portner 1997;von Fintel 1999;Schlenker 2005; Rubinstein 2017; Portner & Rubinstein 2020), I propose causative verbs hai and bun each sub-lexically encodes a doxastic modality, which has a doxastic modal base.When it comes to the ordering source, in the case of hai, I propose it has an priority ordering source pertaining to malefaction; similarly, bun has a priority one pertaining to benefaction.
Unlike the previous two dimensions, this attitude-bearing property only affects the (in)felicity rather than the truth value, and the following evidence supports that the attitude-bearing property comes from presupposition.First, the attitude-bearing reading projects from modal and negation (data omitted due to space limit).Second, this reading can be bound in the if -clause (data omitted).Finally, This reading occurs in a modified form when being the complement of the attitude predicate 'believe' (7) (cf.Potts 2003) The lexical semantics for these two causative verbs are revised below, where there are two sublexical modalities encoded: one is in the at-issue meaning for the actuality entailment issue, and another one is in the presupposition accounting for the speaker's attitude, where the selection function Sim w in Heim ( 1992) is adopted to help indicate a preference for one scenario over another through making use of a concept of comparative similarities among worlds.
Connections between causality and moral reasoning have been long discussed in the philosophical literature (cf.Lagnado & Gerstenberg 2017).Teochew periphrastic causatives bearing the speaker's attitude provide interesting cases to see how grammatical causative structures encode moral reasoning.This further proves the traditional, reductionist approaches to causation are not sophisticated enough and lends additional support to my claim that many variations we find in causative structures are attributed to sublexical modalities.
6. Dimension IV: permissive.The final causal meaning dimension is whether the causative encodes a 'permissive' reading.In the case of Teochew, this is done by encoding social relations between the causer and the causee.To be more specific, in the bun-causative, the causee, different from those in other Teochew causatives, is interpreted as of a lower social status and is permitted by the causer of a higher social status to do the caused event.
Evidence comes from the fact that in Teochew, the clause-final emphatic yes/no-question marker meh can only target an event participant of a higher social status (e.g., more senior), no matter its syntactic position (9).( 9 Meh can only target the causer, not the causee in the 'permissive' bun-causative, even though both the causer and causee are indicated by proper name, and there is no context provided (10).However, meh can target either of them in the other Teochew causatives depending on the world knowledge of the speaker about the hierarchical social relations between event participants.'Is it Nangy that cause Mimi to run by giving permission to that one for running?' NOT 'Is it Mimi that Nangy causes to run by giving permission to that one for running?' In the literature, it has been long noticed that certain cross-linguistic periphrastic causative have a similar 'permissive' or 'allowing' interpretation, e.g., English let-causative, Mandarin rang-causative (Luo & Kang 2023), and German lassen-causatives (Pitteroff 2014).However, to my knowledge, there are very few explicit discussions on what a 'permissive' reading is in the context of causative.This study aims to fill this research gap.I combine insights from the classic philosophical discussions on 'permission' in Kamp (1973) and Lewis (1979), and propose the causative verb bun sublexically encodes an existential deontic modality, with a circumstantial modal base and a deontic ordering source sensitive to social relation between event participants. 3ame as the third dimension, the 'permissive' reading is a presupposition, given it (i) does not affect truth value, (ii) projects from modal and negation and (iii) occurs in a modified form when being the complement of the verb 'believe' (data omitted due to space limit).Interestingly, the social relation reading patterns like a conventional implicature (cf.Potts 2003Potts , 2007aPotts ,b, 2015)): (i) it cannot be bound in the if -clause and (ii) cannot be modified when being the complement of attitude predicates.This corresponds to my proposal treating this reading as being encoded in the modal background.Therefore, I propose the following lexical semantics for the causative verb bun, where two modalities, one in the presupposition accounting for the 'permissive' reading and the other in the at-issue meaning corresponding to the actuality entailment issue, are sublexically encoded.

Conclusion and discussion.
As was shown in previous discussions, the causal relations encoded in these Teochew causative verbs are different in four dimensions: (i) direct vs. indirect (temporal, spatial, intermediary agent), (ii) deterministic vs. probabilistic, (iii) attitude-neutral vs. benefactive/adversative and (iv) permissive vs. non-permissive.These differences are reflected in the lexical entry of each causative verb, which also explains why one language will use more than one causative verb in constructions of the same surface structure.
One might ask whether it is possible that some of the above causal (sub)dimensions are contradictory to each other or whether some of them entail or are associated with others.Here, I will provide a primary discussion on the compatibility between each (sub)dimension in every causative, with an aim to shed light on future discussions along this line.
First, in the case of mue-causative (6a), which is a 'pure deterministic causative', the study demonstrates that this causative disallows a gap between the ending time of the causing event and the start time of the caused event, a distal spatial relation and the existence of an intermediate agent.Such a preference for directness in a causal relation entailing the actuality of the caused event intuitively makes sense.When there is no temporal, spatial, or participant gap between the caused event following the causing event, there is a higher possibility that the caused event will happen at the end.Such kind of connections are also discussed in see Lauer (2010), Martin (2018), Baglini & Bar-Asher Siegal (2020) among others when it comes to associating the interpretative (in)directness, and (non-)actuality entailment of the result corresponding to the causal necessity vs. causal sufficiency in philosophical discussions.
Second, in the case of k@-causative (6b), which is a 'pure probabilistic causative', this study shows that it allows any kind of temporal relation as long as the starting time of causing event is before that of the caused event and it is neutral when it comes to spatial and participant (in)directness.This also intuitively makes sense since a causal relation not entailing the result actuality has no preference for different subdimensions of (in)directness, which follows the same logic I argue for 'pure deterministic causative'.
Third, in the case of hai-causative (8a), which is a 'adversative deterministic causative', this study shows that like the 'pure probabilistic causative', it allows any kind of temporal relation as long as the starting time of the causing event is before that of the caused event and it is neutral when it comes to spatial (in)directness.But interestingly, it disallows the existence of an intermediate agent.Actually, this also intuitively makes sense in that in an 'adversative' causative, where the causer is interpreted as someone to be blamed for bringing about a 'bad' result, if an intermediate agent exists, it will lead to difficulty in picking out the event party to take responsibility.
Fourth, in the case of bun-causative, which is a 'benefactive probabilistic causative', this study shows that it allows any kind of temporal relation as long as the starting time of the causing event is before that of the caused event, but disallows spatial indirectness and the existence of an intermediate agent.The incompatibility between a 'benefactive' action with an intermediate agent intuitively makes sense, since it is also somehow connected to the responsibility issue mentioned in the case of 'adversative deterministic causative', though in this case, it is about giving credit.In other words, 'attitude-bearing causatives', at least in the case of Teochew, disallow an intermediate agent out of concern of tracing back to the responsibility/credit to the causer.Besides, the ungrammaticality of an indirect/distal spatial relation may be due to the fact that a 'benefactive' action, at least in the case of Teochew, requires a proximal spatial relation between the causing event and the caused event.
Additionally, there is an interesting contrast between 'adversative deterministic causative' and 'beneficial probabilistic causative' in terms of the actuality entailment issue of the caused event, i.e., while an 'adversative' reading pairs with a 'deterministic' causative, a 'beneficial' reading pairs with a 'probabilistic' causative.Intuitively, it does follow that once the result actually happens, it is easier to project a 'negative' attitude towards it; in contrast, while people have no idea about the result actuality, they will tend to be positive or neutral, rather than being negative given that there is no clue.Additionally, Lelia Glass (p.c.) points me to the so-called 'Anna Karenina Principle' (Diamond 1997) in the field of social psychology, which might help link the necessity/sufficiency contrast to an emotional distinction between good and bad outcomes here. 4inally, in the case of bun-causative (11), which is 'permissive probabilistic causative', given a 'permission' action has no requirement on a proximal spatial relation and the (non)existence of an intermediate agent (i.e., someone else can pass on the permission from the causer to the causee), its neutrality towards these two subdimensions is expected.In terms of temporal relation, in addition to marking that the starting time of the causing event must be before that of the caused event, the ending time of the causing event cannot be later than that of the caused event.This also intuitively follows, given that it is unnecessary to continue the causing event indicating the permission once the caused event has ended.Last but not least, the 'permission' reading is also compatible with the no actuality entailment of the caused event.Intuitively, a permission action usually does not guarantee the permitted action will happen in the end.Discussions along a similar line on permittee with free choice can be found in Kamp (1973), Portner (2012) and among others.
To summarize, this study shows instantiations of causal relations are complex, even though they are encoded in the same syntactic construction, i.e., periphrastic causative.They cannot be easily captured by the widely adopted monolithic CAUSE operator, and an analysis featuring event semantics paired with modal semantics can help capture the complexity.Most of the causal complexities result from different flavors of sublexical modality encoded in the causative verbs.
In the final, I would like to briefly address the possibility of adopting the alternative Causal Models approach (e.g., Pearl 2000Pearl , 2009;;Paul & Hall 2013) to explain the above complex causal relations encoded in Teochew periphrastic causatives.For Dimension I on (in)directness, the data shows that variables in a causal model need to be defined in a two-dimension (i.e., event and event participant) or a three-dimension (i.e., time, space and participant) way.While adding into the variable nodes two different types of relators might seem logically possible, it also makes this underdeveloped mechanism too theoretically unconstrained.Dimension II on actuality entailment is probably the easiest one to be implemented in a causal model.One alternative is to follow what Baglini & Bar-Asher Siegal (2020), Nadathur & Lauer (2020) and many others did, making the distributions of directed nodes in the causal graph representing the causal knowledge a representation of this causal sufficiency/necessity r elation.The other alternative is to follow Paul & Hall (2013), assuming that the arrows are token-level stimulatory connections between nodes and that the stimulatory signal can be probabilistic.For Dimension IV on encoding speaker's attitude, to my knowledge, currently, there is no mature technique to build the attitude of an event observer into a causal model.Lastly, in the case of Dimension IV on 'permission', we face a mix of issues: event participants (cf.Dimension I) with a social relation hierarchy observed by an event observer (cf.Dimension III) need to be built into the model, together with the deontic meaning which is also hard to be encoded.Given the discussions so far, I think we can safely conclude that a causal model analysis is not as sophisticated and fine-grained as an analysis featuring event semantics paired with modal semantics.Though I am optimistic about the future fine application of Causal Models in linguistics, I choose modal semantics as an analytic tool to account for the Teochew data.