Abstract

This study aims to describe the causative constructions in modern standard Arabic (MSA) and discuss their analyses. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to discuss the causative constructions in MSA. This study shows that there are three different types of causatives in MSA: the lexical causative, the periphrastic causative, and the morphological causative. We discuss the three types of causatives in MSA and the associated thematic roles of arguments, especially the morphological causatives, where the number of arguments and their thematic roles are changed after the derivation. The role of the causee is always patient, and the role of the causer is always an agent of the event even if the basic verb requires a subject with a different role. The last section of this study presents a syntactic analysis of the three structures of causatives in MSA within the lexical functional grammar framework.

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