Single Review on past events

Prerna Nadathur (Postdoctoral Fellow / Dept. of Linguistics) was "Talking about causation: cause, make, and causal intentions".

Literature/Links: https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/5297/

Abstract: 

"Talking about causation: cause, make, and causal intentions"
Prerna Nadathur (joint work with Sven Lauer, former fellow at the Zukunftskolleg)

Like many languages, English has a variety of verbs which can be used to describe causal relationships between two individuals and/or events.

(1) a. Stravinsky caused the audience to riot.
     b. Stravinsky made the audience riot.
     c. Stravinsky had the audience riot.
     d. Stravinsky got the audience to riot.

Each of the periphrastic causative verbs in (1) conveys that Stravinsky played a role in bringing the riot about. However, the claims are not simply paraphrases of one another, but are understood to describe different kinds of causal situations: (1b), for instance, suggests that Stravinsky exerted some kind of force over his audience, while (1c) might indicate that he took a more hands-off ‘directorial’ role, and so on.
Traditional approaches to causal language take these verbs to be unified by making reference to a (cognitively basic) relation of causal dependence, typically called cause (Dowty 1979). As a lexical atom (or basic unit of meaning), cause is often identified with the meaning of the English verb cause, and assumed to describe a counterfactual relationship in which an event designated as the effect would have been impossible in the absence of the cause. On this hypothesis, the implications specific to each of the causatives in (1b)-(1d) must follow from additional, non-causal lexical atoms which are encoded alongside cause in the meanings of these verbs: this predicts that the set of contexts in which make, have, and get can be used are, respectively, subsets of the set of appropriate contexts for cause.
The linguistic data does not support this monolithic view of causal dependencies. Against the idea of a single causal primitive (cause), I argue that causal language employs an inventory of basic and contrasting causal relationships, which can be modeled as different structural configurations within a computational causal model (e.g., Shoham 1990, Pearl 2000). I develop the argument for a pluralist view of linguistic causation by focusing on a comparative analysis of make and cause, showing that intuitive (linguistic) judgements about contrasts in the appropriate use and interpretation of these verbs are best explained on a theory which establishes a basic distinction between verbs which predicate causal sufficiency of a cause for an effect (e.g., make and German lassen), and those which instead predicate causal necessity (e.g., cause). I offer definitions of these dependence relations within the framework of a Pearl-style structural equation (network) model for causal reasoning, and show how they interact with context-dependent and variable features such as (a participant’s) agency and intentions. The ways in which we talk about causation naturally reflect the cognitive representation of causation: the success of the pluralistic approach in explaining the use and interpretation of causative verbs thus suggests that causation is not conceptualized in terms of a single binary dependence relation, but instead in terms of complex networks in which individuals, intentions, and events affect one another in distinct ways.