Analytic causatives – A German-Italian comparative approach

In this paper we approach the analytic causative construction (ACC) from a comparative perspective. Based on a comparison between Italian and German, we arrive at certain similarities that suggest an underlying, uniform syntactic structure. Three differences between the languages under investigation, such as the obligation effect, word order, and case marking are used to adjust the general structure in certain ways. Ultimately, word order and case differences are shown to be reducible to one particular structural difference, i.e. the embedding of a VoiceP/ApplP by the causative predicate.