Talk:Causative

Ancient information
There are many sections of this page that are ancient (at least 6 years old or so). They have no citations, and are virtually identical to their original versions. The page has changed significantly since then and I propose we scrap what isn't cited. This mostly includes the sections "Syntactic causative constructions", "Causative voice", and the vast majority of the language examples. They mostly don't contribute to the discussion other than redundant information. Joeystanley (talk) 19:40, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Typography Section
Currently, this page has a typology section which summarizes some prominent sources on the topic of causatives. I'm thinking about merging these so we can get the general picture. Each of the four authors will be represented, but I feel that other authors' work could be more easily added. It'll also get a clearer picture of what causatives are rather than what individuals' opinions are. Thoughts? Joeystanley (talk) 19:39, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

References, citations, and general tone of the page.
While I appreciate the research of whomever did the Typography part of the page, there are a lot of problems with the citations and tone there. This reads like it was once a research paper and was then copied and pasted in. Here are some things that need to be fixed:
 * The writer mentions a source in-line, such as (Dixon 2000) and then inserts page numbers in parentheses, like this (19).
 * There are no italics for book names in the references themselves (typical for copying and pasting something in)
 * The author uses the "I", "me", and "us" (some have already been flagged).
 * In-text citations do not have reference codes, but instead, there's a bibliography
 * There are in-text citations that are not present in the bibliography or are incorrect (wrong year or page).

I've tried to fix some of these problems, though I haven't done much with the text quite yet:
 * I've gone through and replaced all the in-text page numbers with reference codes. I've adopted the  syntax for citing multiple pages of a single source. I've also made each of the main sources their own named reference to cut down on the number of refs in the reflist.
 * As for the references themselves, I've standardized the way they look (Italics for book titles, etc.)
 * I've tagged words such as "I" and "us" with the  tag.
 * Unknown citations are posted here for reference:
 * "Typology" section—(1976a: 1-2) [this presumably is where the quote is from, presumably on Shibantini (2001:19), but then again, I can't tell. I've added a citation needed tag.]
 * "Comrie" section—Keenan and Comrie (1972), Croft 1990: 147,
 * "Song" section—(1976a: 1-2), (Dryer 1989: 267)
 * I've fixed the incorrect citations whenever I could (although I don't have access to all of the references).

As for the languages, it appears that Native American languages (Guarani, Uto-Aztecan, Athabaskan, Hupa, and Yup'ik) have had good contributors. However, none of the others (unfortunately, the more commonly spoken languages) have any citations whatsoever.

I fixed the "ibid" citations in Athabaskan, though I'm not sure why that section was quoted.

Joeystanley (talk) 17:54, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Sourcing
Almost none of the examples have citations. I am going to go through and try to add some where I can, and will probably delete those I can't source and replace them with examples from published grammars, including citations. I will also add a section on susceptibility to morphological causation, later tonight.

--Escamilla 17:00, 15 Dec 2010 (UTC)

Becoming
"In some languages there are morphological devices (such as inflection) that change verbs into their causative forms, or adjectives into verbs of "becoming"." -- The part about "verbs of 'becoming'" doesn't seem quite right to me; the idea isn't so much "becoming ___" as "making (something) become ___", right? But I'm not sure how to word it so that it sounds right. 24.159.255.29 00:39, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

Factitive
I see that Wikipedia has no factitive page. What is the difference between the causative of an adjective/stative verb and a factitive? 24.159.255.29 00:50, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
 * ignoring this question for 9 years makes the current article quality suspect.  All  the definitions of factitive say "transitive".  Wiktionary says "causative" but gives NO SOURCES supporting that definition.  Factitive means transitive.  Stop pointing searches for "factitive" here until this article includes an explanation of the linkage.  108.18.136.147 (talk) 12:05, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Merge proposal
Causative voice should be merged to Causative. - TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 08:12, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I have merged Causative voice to Causative. - TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 01:45, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Rewriting
I've just rewritten the article almost completely. Besides being in the "Systemic Bias" list, it didn't cover much of causation really. Too many Sanskrit examples (which are fine but belong in Sanskrit) and some Klingon (ditto, plus irrelevant, and inadequate &mdash; Klingon is a constructed language especially designed to be unnatural for humans).

Examples are needed still. I have only English and Spanish as European languages; more variety would be nice. For the stative adjectives and some regular causative inflection, sbdy more knowledgeable of Japanese than I am should explain the causative.

--Pablo D. Flores 15:29, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The use of the subheadings in the article is a bit hard to follow and does not seem to help the article flow very naturally nor smoothly. For example, under "Devices" is another subheading "Lexical" under which multiple subheadings are listed, but not introduced nor defined very effectively in the overarching subheadings. Also, some subheadings do not have content written for them. Perhaps a deletion of those subheadings (e.g. "Germanic") will help clean up the article a bit until some reliable content can be written for it. Finally, citing your sources for the examples under the "Examples" subheading would improve the quality of this article. DzhouLING300 (talk) 04:26, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Causative voice versus the subject of this article
Someone added a hatnote (which I templatized) reading "This article is about the causative voice. For the unrelated concept of the causative mood, see Causative mood." But Causative is only a section of this article; the redirect Causative voice points to that section. Is everything discussed in the article about the causative voice, or only the material in that section? If the latter, what should we say in the hatnote that the entire article is about, instead of the voice, to distinguish it from the mood? Largoplazo (talk) 10:58, 11 August 2023 (UTC)