Ebook: A Study Concerning the Latin Origins of French Causatives

This study centers on three areas of investigation concerning the French causative construction faire faire quelque chose a quelqu'un: (1) the evolution of the Latin causative structure from the ut-sentential to the accusativus-cum-infinitivo; (2) the presence of the dative semantic agent of the infinitive in both the Latin and the French causatives; (3) the generalization of a monoclausal, impermeable syntactic faire-infinitive structure in modern French in place of the biclausal (accusativus-cum-infinitivo) structure observed in earlier stages of the language. In an attempt to define chronologically the development of the syntactic and semantic features of the causative construction in proto-Romance, this study offers a detailed examination of a corpus of Vulgar Latin and Old French documents with an eye toward establishing numerical indices of the various overlapping stages in the development of the above-mentioned characteristics of the causative construction.

Data incorporating approximately 200 examples of the causative construction in Latin and 200 in Old French, in 13 texts from the first to the fifteenth centuries, suggest the following observations: (1) the infinitive complement was the rule for causatives in Latin as early as the sixth century; (2) the impermeable (i.e., with no intervening nominal) verb-plus-infinitive complex is completely generalized in Latin as early as the ninth century, it is almost completely generalized (90%) in French by the thirteenth century, and it has become the only possibility with faire-infinitive by the fifteenth; (3) the development of the 'dative subject' in the construction faire faire quelque chose a quelqu'un is a Romance phenomenon attributable to relational or semantic factors, and the texts do not support the theory that the dative in French is a descendant of the occurrence of the dative with facere and other jussive verbs in Latin.