Burning facts: thick and thin causatives

Lexical causative verbs are traditionally assumed to pattern uniformly: they specify only a result state, leaving the manner of causing unarticulated, like the overt cause. We argue that this view obscures a fundamental division within English causative verbs. Building on Rose et al. (2021), we show that a substantial subset of causatives – thick causatives such as burn, melt, break, bury – encode information about the way a change is brought about, and that this specification yields systematic semantic and pragmatic restrictions. Thick causatives in their physical sense resist subjects that denote absences, facts, degrees, or events that fail to instantiate the appropriate productive (force- transmitting) mechanism, in contrast to thin causatives like kill, destroy, and change, which readily combine with such subjects. Using corpus evidence from a representative sample of 37 frequent English causatives, we demonstrate (i) that most thick causatives pattern like Embick’s 2009 break-causatives – compatible with strong adjectival resultatives and requiring production-based causation – while (ii) some thick causatives (e.g., bury) encode the relevant manner information via the state they lexicalize rather than via an event predicate. We develop a pragmatic competition account linking the production constraint to the directness constraint, yielding a unified explanation for the distribution of thick vs. thin causatives in English.