Jose Carillo's English Forum - Essays by Jose Carillo

ESSAYS BY JOSE CARILLO

On this webpage, Jose A. Carillo shares with English users, learners, and teachers a representative selection of his essays on the English language, particularly on its uses and misuses. One essay will be featured every week, and previously featured essays will be archived in the forum.

Verbs for actions that we don’t do ourselves

Either by choice or circumstance, there are some things that people won’t do themselves but would rather ask, allow, or force other people to do for them. One reason is that perhaps the task is beneath their dignity to do; another is that directly doing it to or with the other person may be too unpleasant, so it’s better done through a third party; and still another is that the act could be patently immoral, illegal, or criminal, so it needs to be done by another person—perhaps a hired hand—with less or no scruples at all.

Verbs that are used to denote such actions are called causative verbs. There aren’t many of them, like “have,” “let,” “allow,” “cause,” and “ask,” but they are unlike most verbs in that they need to be followed by an object and an infinitive, as in “I asked them to mop the floor” (“them” is the direct object of the causative verb “asked,” and “to mop” is the infinitive, followed by “floor” which is its direct object). An ordinary verb for an action that you do yourself, of course, is immediately followed by the direct object, as in “I mopped the floor.”

In the essay below that I wrote for my column in The Manila Times almost four years ago, I explain the mechanics and construction of causative verbs and throw in a brief explanation of factitive verbs as well. I trust that Forum members will find this essay an instructive refresher on the usage of these two types of verbs.

Click on the title below to read the essay.

Using causative and factitive verbs

When an awful act or serious mistake is made, particularly one that leads to a disastrous or tragic outcome, rare indeed is the soul that comes out in the open to take the blame for it. The usual response of the culpable is to ascribe the deed to somebody else or something else: “They had me scoop the money from the vault at gunpoint.” (The perpetrator of an inside job is trying to extricate himself from the crime.) “An earthquake made the mountain unleash the deadly mudslide.” (Actually, loggers had ruthlessly stripped the mountain of every inch of its forest cover.) “The steel gate’s collapse caused the people to stampede.” (The crowd-control measures simply were too puny for so large a mass of humanity aiming to get rich quick.)

The English language has, in fact, evolved a special verb form to make people avoid acknowledging responsibility—if only for the moment—when caught in such situations. That verb form is the causative verb, which carries out an action that causes another action to happen. In the three sentences given as examples above, in particular, “have” is the causative verb in the first, causing the action “scoop” to happen; “make” is the causative verb in the second, causing the action “unleash” to happen; and “cause” is the causative verb in the third, causing the action “stampede” to happen. In each case, the crime or calamitous outcome is acknowledged but no one is accepting responsibility for it.

Causative verbs are, of course, not only meant to make people avoid taking responsibility for things that have gone sour or disastrous. In general, they are used to indicate the sort of actions that people don’t do themselves but allow, ask, or force other people to do: “Emily’s supervisor permitted her to leave early today.” “Our landlady reminded us to pay our overdue rent.” “The thieves forced the tourists to hand over their jewelry.”

Note that in a causative construction, the subject doesn’t actually do the action of the operative verb but only causes the object to do that action. In the last example above, for instance, the subject is “the thieves” and the object is “the tourists,” and the causative verb “force” makes this object do the action of handing over the jewelry.

The other most commonly used causative verbs are “allow,” “assist,” “convince,” “employ,” “help,” “hire,” “let,” “motivate,” “remind,” “require,” and “urge.” When used in a sentence, practically all of these causative verbs are followed by an object (a noun or pronoun) followed by an infinitive: “We allowed foreigners to invest in the local mining industry.” “The recruiter convinced me to leave for Jeddah at once.” “The desperate applicant employed deceit to get the plum job.”

The only notable exceptions to this pattern are the causative verbs “have,” “make,” and “let.” They are followed by a noun or pronoun serving as an object, but this time what follows the object is not an infinitive but the base form of the verb (meaning its infinitive form without the “to”): “I had my fellow investors sign the incorporation papers yesterday.” “They made him finish writing the book in only five weeks.” “We let the students pick the class schedules they want.”

Like the causative verb, another type of verb that exhibits peculiar behavior is the so-called factitive verb. While the usual transitive verb can take only one direct object, a factitive verb actually needs two of them. There are only a few of its kind, however, among them “choose,” “elect,” “judge,” “adjudge,” “make,” “name,” and “select.”

Here’s how a factitive verb works: “The prestigious finance magazine last night chose our company “Best at Consumer Goods” in its annual poll.” Here, “choose” is the factitive verb, “our company” is the direct object, and “‘Best at Consumer Goods’” is the objective complement—all three in tight, uninterrupted interlock. (February 20, 2006)

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Previously Featured Essay:

Shoptalk on jargon and gobbledygook

An essay that I wrote for my column in The Manila Times away back in 2002, “The Great Gobbledygook-Generating Machine,”was featured in January 2006 by Vocabula.com, a well-regarded English-usage web magazine based in Massachusetts. That essay, which later became Chapter 12 of my book, English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, takes a playful dig at a little electronic device on the Internet that can churn out around 40,000 insights on how to run companies in grammar-perfect but nonsensical English. Click this link to read that essay in the Bookshop section of the Forum.

I was quietly happy just to see that little piece of mine still alive and relevant even after the passing of the years, but I was truly delighted when I received a very touching congratulatory e-mail for it from a fellow editor and writer in Wales in the United Kingdom. Jude Roland, who runs a professional writing service in Monmouthshire, wrote me a note so evocative about the travails of putting other people’s English writing into good shape that I have decided to share it with Times readers.

Here’s that e-mail:

Dear Jose,

I enjoyed your piece enormously. Much of what I laughingly call my “career” has been spent in trying to de-mystify the corporate jargon and obfuscation of other writers, who seem to feel more important and knowledgeable when they issue incomprehensible communications.

For more than three decades, I have advocated and encouraged clarity and directness. But those of us who care deeply about the potency of English now have to contend with something worse than commercial nincompoops [mishandling the language]. In the UK in particular, for at least five years in the 1980s, educational “experts” had been saying that it was “more important for children to express themselves in writing than to worry about spelling and grammar.” And oh, have the chickens come home to roost!

Add to this the universal overreliance on computer spell-checkers with their inherent idiocies, and you have a formidable problem. Neither you nor I, alas, will be able solve it!

But please do go on fighting the good fight and continue writing lively, cogent essays. Perhaps, when climate change finally destroys Earth, some remnants of humanity will remain, and in the long, slow climb back from the brink, their leaders may again learn to cherish and venerate “the word.”

Jude Roland

And here’s my rejoinder to that note:

Dear Jude,

I apologize for this much-delayed reply. I have been so frenetically busy during the past two weeks doing a very challenging substantive editing job for a major client that I could hardly find time to deal with my correspondence.

I’m glad to know that you are a kindred spirit pursuing a career demystifying corporate jargon and other forms of gobbledygook, but I beg to differ with you by saying that I rarely find my job a laughing matter. It’s always a deadly serious business to be welcomed with wide, open arms. I’m sure that many professionals—medical surgeons, dentists, and physical therapists in particular—feel the same way about their work even if few of them would dare to admit it. In fact, I’ll probably be ruing the day when people all over the world have finally learned how to write English on their own clearly, precisely, and without obfuscation. By then, I’ll really have no choice but to pull down my shingle for keeps.

In the meantime, Jude, you and I will just have to continue the good fight for plain and simple English—both as an honest livelihood and as a thankless personal advocacy. We should do it in much the same way that the magnificent peacemakers of this planet have been suing for lasting peace on earth for thousands of years now—assiduously, sometimes so stridently, but largely to no avail.

(February 13, 2006)

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