Letting Structure Speak with Authority: Constraining Agents’ Choices with French laisser
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Abstract
Agents’ actions and intentions can be prompted or hindered in multiple ways. Across languages, verbs that lexicalize the causative primitives of CAUSE, ENABLE or PREVENT (Wolff & Song 2003) can help us understand the nature of agency, precisely because they involve multiple participants which are sometimes seen as being in a position of influencing each other via different types of relations. In this paper, we focus on the role of authority, intended as an influence that affects the choices available to a free agent with respect to the actions in service of their goal. We show that, while many causative verbs seem to imply the type of force relation between the participants in their lexical meaning, the French causative verb laisser is underspecified: the type of influence exerted by the two participants in a laisser relation is determined by the syntactic structure of the causative construction.