40 Cause
The most common way to express cause in English is with a verb that means basically ‘cause.’ For example, we can say ‘I caused him to eat,’ ‘I made him eat,’ ‘I had him eat,’ and many other ways of getting this idea that ‘I’ was the cause of him eating.
Another way English expresses cause is through verbs that have the notion of cause built into the meaning. For example, the sentence ‘I fed him’ means ‘I caused him to eat.’ We say that ‘feed’ is the causative of ‘eat’ since ‘feed’ means ‘cause to eat.’ Most English verbs, though, have no special causative form. For many verbs, like ‘sleep,’ you just have to use a ‘cause’ verb phrase like ‘put to sleep’ to express the ‘cause’ idea.
The third way of expressing cause in English is used with many intransitive verbs. Verbs like ‘walk’ are causative when they are transitive, and noncausative when they are intransitive. For example, ‘I walked’ is intransitive (no direct object) and there is no idea of ‘cause’ involved. But ‘I walked the dog’ is transitive (‘the dog’ is the object) and also expresses the idea that I caused the dog to walk.
Klallam also has three basic ways of expressing ‘cause’ in a sentence, but they are all quite different from the ways English does it. In fact, Klallam entirely lacks the three methods used by English. Klallam has no verbs like ‘caused’ or ‘made’ to make sentences like ‘I made him eat,’ it has no words like ‘feed’ with a ‘cause’ meaning built in, and intransitive verbs can never be used with a ‘cause’ meaning, like English ‘walk the dog.’ As you will see in this section, Klallam uses suffixes on the verb to express cause.
The Klallam causative suffixes are transitivizers. Like the ‑t and ‑nəxʷ suffixes (§7.1 and §7.2), the causative suffixes are added to an intransitive verb to create a transitive verb–a verb that an object suffix can attach to.
It is possible to add only the ‘let’ causative to a transitive. See the feathers in §40.3 for an example. Otherwise, it is not possible to add a causative to a word that is already transitive. To say something like ‘I made him feed the dog,’ you would have to say it indirectly using the ‘that’s why’ construction (§39.2), as in sát cn; níɬ kʷaʔčaʔ sxʷʔíɬəntxʷs cə sqáxaʔ ‘I told him to; that’s why he fed the dog.’
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- Grammar Montler, et al.