Causative 'make' and 'faire'. A case of mismatch

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle [UCL]

While causative 'make' and 'faire' are often considered as equivalents, a corpus-based contrastive analysis reveals that this is far from being the case. In fact, using Altenberg’s (1999) concept of ‘mutual translatability’, it appears that the two verbs correspond to one another in only 15% of the cases. A number of explanations will be given for this lack of equivalence. Besides the obvious argument that English, unlike French, has other periphrastic causative verbs available ('cause', 'get', 'have', etc.), it will be shown that other characteristics set 'make' and 'faire' apart, for example the more lexicalised nature of 'faire', with among others causeeless constructions which have no direct equivalent in English (cf. 'faire remarquer' = ‘make notice’ or 'faire penser' = ‘make think’), or the more informal status of 'make', which makes it less suited for some genres.