Do as Analytic Causative.

I was led down a rabbit hole today by ktschwarz, who linked to this 2011 Log post, whose long comment thread I read with fascination. I was particularly struck by a comment by Suzanne Kemmer which I must have read at the time, since I commented later on, but which I’d completely forgotten in the ensuing decade and a half; since it’s so interesting, I’m reposting it here in the hope of both enlightening the multitudes and remembering it myself:

On till death do us part:

I’ve researched the various analytic causative constructions in the history of English. The “make” causative as in it made me laugh only started to emerge in Middle English. An older analytic causative, occurring in Old English and persisting through the Middle English period, was [don (the ancestor of Modern English do) + (direct object) + INF]. So “it did us laugh” was the normal way of saying “it made us laugh”.

Till death do us part means ‘until death causes us to part’. The main verb do is in the subjunctive, to indicate irrealis. That’s why it does not have a 3rd person sg. marker in this preserved formula.

In Old English the don analytic causative construction also did not take the to that precedes infinitivals in most of the modern infinitival complement constructions. to only became grammaticalized later, and never made it to constructions with make, let, and the later have causative.

The Old English construction had a ‘sister construction’ based on the verb latan ‘let’, which functioned as a causative with human direct objects (as in the Old English analogue of ‘they let him come’ which could mean ‘they let him come’ but also ‘they had him come’.

Both the don and latan causatives in Old English have “cognate constructions” which have persisted all through the history of Dutch, namely [doen/laten + (D.O.) + INF]). As in Old English, if you leave out the direct object of these verbs (an argument that also functions as the subject of the infinitive), it is interpreted as an unspecified, usually generic causee, something like “they let proclaim the law” meaning ‘they caused (GENERIC CAUSEE) to proclaim the law’. Sorry I can’t generate Old English and Dutch examples from where I currently am, far from home. Arie Verhagen and his students have written about the history of the Dutch constructions.

All these constructions have changed through time: English lost the ‘do’ causative, except in the expression ’til death do us part’; the make causative largely replaced it but is more semantically specialized (I wrote a paper about what it means in Mod. English–it is not a “general” causative construction). The borrowed verb cause, with to before the complement, covers some of the semantic territory of the old construction, but in the last couple centuries the have causative has appeared, with a semantic specialization for certain types of human-on-human causation.

It was suggested by some grammarians, I don’t remember if it was Visser or someone else, that the English make causative was a Middle English calque on the French faire causative. Analytic causatives are kind of rare and most of them seem to be based on verbs other than those meaning ‘make’.

I presume the paper she mentions is “Causative Constructions and Cognitive Models: The English Make Causative” (The First Seoul International Conference on Discourse and Cognitive Linguistics: Perspectives for the 21st Century [Seoul: Discourse and Cognitive Linguistics Society of Korea, 2001], 803-846). It is striking to me that almost no modern speakers of English know what the extremely common phrase “till death do us part” originally meant.

As lagniappe, I noticed an intriguing item in the Demographics section of the Wikipedia article on Torrance, California (I’ve bolded it):

The top five reported languages (people were allowed to report up to two languages, thus the figures will generally add to more than 100%) were English (_%), Spanish (_%), Indo-European (_%), Asian and Pacific Islander (_%), and Other (_%).

Finally Indo-Europeanists have a place to do field research!