Baklouti, A. - Ergativity

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LINGUA-102782; No. of Pages 18
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Lingua xxx (2019) 102782
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Transitivity-ergativity perspectives on causation in

legal texts: A contrastive study of Arabic and English
website terms of service
Akila Sellami-Baklouti
Research Laboratory Approaches to Discourse (LAD), Faculty of Letters and Humanities, University of Sfax
(Tunisia), Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, B.P. 1168, 3000 Sfax, Tunisia
Received 25 May 2019; received in revised form 4 November 2019; accepted 21 November 2019
Abstract
The description of grammatical systems of languages constitutes one of the major objectives of Systemic Functional Linguistics
(SFL). The present study investigates the system of causation in English and Arabic in a contrastive perspective, and aims to show that in
addition to typological differences, the lexicogrammatical realisation of causation may be activated by contextual factors. To this end, the
instances of causation in three parallel corpora of website Terms of Service (TOS) are explored from transitivity and ergativity
perspectives, argued to be complementary. The investigation of the semantics and lexicogrammar of causation shows that lexical,
morphological and analytic resources have varying frequencies in the two sub-corpora, reflecting general probabilities in the systems of
the two languages. This divergence between the two languages has led to devising separate systems for English and Arabic, in addition
to common systems, modifying thus the original system based on the English language (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014). The study also
shows that the impact of contextual factors is cross-linguistic, confirming, thus, the higher position of the context stratum. These findings
pave the way for more contrastive register-based studies extending to other registers and aiming to enrich SFL theoretical constructs and
tools of grammatical descriptions.
© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: English; Arabic; Contrastive study; Ergativity; Transitivity; Causation
1. Introduction
The description of grammatical systems of languages constitutes one of the major objectives of Systemic Functional
Linguistics (henceforth, SFL), being a ‘reliable tool’ for ‘the description of specific areas within languages’ (Arús-Hita,
2018: 163). Given that multilingualism is the default condition in human history, these grammatical descriptions have
tended to adopt a contrastive perspective, exploring variations between pairs or sets of languages in their realisational
types of a given meaning (Lavid and Arús Hita, 2002; Arús-Hita, 2018; Chik, 2018, to cite a few examples). The present
study aims to investigate the realisation of causative meaning in English and Arabic in a contrastive perspective.
However, variation between languages can also come ‘‘from above’’, as the lexicogrammatical realisations of meaning
can vary according to the context of use (Matthiessen, 2018). Therefore, contrastive studies may be register-based,
E-mail address: Akila.sellami@flshs.usf.tn.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2019.102782
0024-3841/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: Sellami-Baklouti, A., Transitivity-ergativity perspectives on causation in legal texts: A
contrastive study of Arabic and English website terms of service. Lingua (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
lingua.2019.102782
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2 A. Sellami-Baklouti / Lingua xxx (2019) 102782
taking texts with one register or a small set of registers as the basis for investigating variation between languages
(Teruya and Matthiessen, 2015). Accordingly, the present study will investigate causation in the legal register,
taking parallel texts of website Terms of Service (henceforth, TOS) as a case study. According to a taxonomy of texts,
based on the contextual variable of field (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014: 36), the socio-semiotic activity undertaken in
the legal register may be classified as ‘‘enabling some course of activity by instructing people in how to undertake it or
regulating the activity by controlling people's actions’’ (p. 37, emphasis mine). Indeed, in website TOS, the two aspects
of ‘enabling’ are present, because on the one hand, TOS ‘instruct’ people by providing guidelines on how to use the
website; and on the other, they ‘regulate’ this use through some conditions. This taxonomy based on field as a
contextual factor is directly relevant to the purposes of the present study, which undertakes to investigate how the
meanings of ‘instructing’ and ‘regulating’ activate the lexicogrammatical realisations of causation in the two languages
under study. The study also aims to show that in addition to typological differences that may exist between
English and Arabic, the two sub-corpora display similarities which are activated by the registerial contextual factors.
Therefore, adopting a ‘‘trinocular perspective matching up contextual, semantic and lexicogrammatical considera-
tions’’ (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014: 35), the analysis of the corpus will explore commonalities and divergences
between Arabic and English, providing first a contrastive description of the lexicogrammar of causation in the two
languages; and then extending the investigation to the higher stratum of context, by mapping lexicogrammatical
realisations of causation with the generic features of the enabling genre of the corpus. The paper is organised as
follows. Section two sets the background for the study: first, it defines causative verbs [2.1]; then, it outlines the two
perspectives of their investigation in systemic functional theory, namely transitivity and ergativity [2.2]. Arguments for
the relevance of the combination of the two perspectives to the contrastive study are presented in [2.3]; and [2.4]
highlights the importance of the contextual approach and presents the motivation for the choice of website TOS as a
corpus of this study. Based on a corpus of three parallel website TOS, namely Facebook, Google and CNN, section
three presents a contrastive investigation of causation in the two languages. This investigation first takes a typological
perspective, which explores systemic variation between the two languages [3.2]; and then a contextual perspective
which explains the similarities between the two language in their lexicogrammatical realisation of causation by generic
and registerial factors [3.3].
2. Background
After a brief definition of causative verbs and causative constructions (representing causative situations), this section
overviews the SFL perspective on these constructions, and argues for the relevance of a contrastive contextual
approach.
2.1. Causative verbs and causative situations
A causative verb may be broadly defined as ‘‘a verb form which indicates that the subject caused an action to be carried
out thus to fell is the causative of to fall’’ (Hartmann and Stork, 1972: 33). The fact that a causative verb is defined through
its ‘subject’, usually referred to as ‘Causer’, implies that causative meaning is the outcome of not only the verb but also
other elements in the clause, leading linguists to deal with ‘causative constructions’ rather than ‘causative verbs’.
Shibatani (1976: 1) defines a causative construction ‘‘by way of characterizing the situation, which may be called the
causative situation’’. He posits two necessary conditions that characterize a causative situation: the first is that the caused
event E2 is posterior to the causing event E1; and the second is that the occurrence of E2 totally depends on the
occurrence of E1, allowing for a counterfactual analysis: E2 would not have occurred if E1 had not. According to Shibatani
(1976: 2),
(1) a. I (Causer) sent John (Causee) to the drugstore
is a causative construction expressing a causative situation, because (1) John went to the drugstore (E2) after I sent
him (E1) and (2) John would not have gone to the drugstore if I had not sent him.
This complexity of causative constructions has raised the interest in studying them from different perspectives and
theoretical strands since the 1970s. While some studies investigated the semantic properties of causative verbs and
causative constructions (e.g. Baron, 1974; Shibatani, 1976; Talmy, 1976) and the different traits of the Causer (e.g.
Fillmore, 1968, 1971; Huddleston, 1970; Baudet et al., 1997), others focused on the structural aspects of causative
constructions (e.g. Tesnière, 1969; Comrie, 1976). A more functional account was provided by Dik (1983), who reconciled
the syntactic and semantic aspects of causation by postulating a causative predicate formation rule:
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Causative predicate formation

Input: pred (x1). . .. . .(xn)
Output: caus-pred (x0) Causer . . .. . .(x1) Causee . . .. . . (xn)
Meaning: ‘x0 brings it about that the state of affairs designed by the input predicate-frame takes place/obtains’1
(Dik, 1983: 11)
Example 1, repeated below, illustrates this causative formation rule, with (1) b. being the ‘input’ and (1) c. being the ‘output’:
(1) b. John went to the drugstore.

c. I sent John to the drugstore.
Therefore, the causative predicate formation rule is applied to a given predicate to add: (1) a Causer (at the level of
meaning), and (2) an extra argument (at the level of structure), thus making of causation a ‘prime’ example of valency
extension (at both syntactic and semantics levels). Another functional account of causation was provided by SFL, which
constitutes the theoretical perspective from which causation is studied in the present work.
2.2. An SFL perspective on causation
Treating causation as a feature of situations rather than verbs has also been assumed by SFL accounts recognizing
the existence of ‘‘a causative meaning in the structure of the English clause’’ (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014: 578).
Despite the importance of the verb in conveying causation, ‘‘the whole clause rather than the verb, determines experiential
semantics’’ (Halliday, 1961; 1967; cited in Davidse, 2017: 80), and causative meaning is to be treated as the outcome of
process-participant semantics. In SFL, causation can be investigated either from a transitive perspective, where the
investigation targets a classification of the different kinds of processes2 that may express causation and the role of
participant that brings about the change; or an ergative perspective, ‘‘which focuses on the fact that the process may
happen by itself or be caused to happen’’ (Thompson, 2014: 139). The following paragraphs outline these two
perspectives and conclude on their complementarity for the purposes of the present study.
From a transitive perspective, the participant that brings about the causative process is represented by some means as
a ‘causer’; therefore, the role and the participant label assigned to it depend on the kind of the process caused (Thompson,
2014: 129). ‘Attributor’ is used when the caused process is attributive (example 2); ‘Assigner’ is used when the caused
process is identifying (example 3); ‘Inducer’ when the caused process is mental (example 4); and ‘Initiator’ when the
caused process is material (example 5).
(2) That noise (Attributor) is driving me crazy.

(3) The Queen (Assigner) forced him to be her new lover.
(4) My sense of paranoia (Inducer) made me think that something was going wrong all the time.
(5) The drive (Initiator) to succeed led her to betray her friends.
(Thompson, 2014: 130)
Examples 2--5 show analytic causation, expressed by a group verb complex, but causation can also be expressed
lexically, where the causer ‘directly’ acts on the second participant, as example 6 and its analytic version, example 7, show:
(6) John rolled the ball.

(7) John made the ball roll.
(Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014: 579)
Although the transitivity perspective provides a detailed account of process and participants roles, it cannot capture the
systemic difference in ergative/non-ergative pairs (Thompson, 2014: 139), as illustrated by Examples 8 (a) and (b):
1
‘‘x1 . . . xn’’ refer the arguments that the predicate takes.
2
In SFL, processes are classified into six types, based on the type of experience they denote: (1) material processes denote ‘doing and
happening’; (2) mental processes denote ‘sensing’; (3) relational processes denote ‘being and having’; (4) behavioural processes denote
‘behaving’; (5) verbal processes denote ‘saying’; and (6) existential processes are about existing. Each of these process types engenders certain
participant roles. For more details on process types and participants, see Halliday and Matthiessen (2014, pp. 211--310) and Thompson (2014,
pp. 94--118).
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(8) (a) [Actor] He [Process: material] deflated [Goal] the ball.

(b) [Actor] The ball [Process: material] deflated
(Thompson, 2014: 141)
While in example 8 (b), the process is presented as autonomous, in example 8 (a), it is presented as instigated.
However, in both examples the first participant from a transitivity perspective is an Actor despite the intuitive feeling in 8 (b)
that there is an external force/cause behind deflating the ball. Hence, the ergative perspective may prove to be particularly
useful in capturing this difference between the ‘‘real world’’ and ‘‘the semantics of English’’ (Halliday and Matthiessen,
2014: 342) because in both examples 9 (a) and (b), ‘the ball’ is treated as Medium, but in 9 (a), an additional participant
Agent is introduced to express the cause behind the process:
(9) (a) [Agent] He [Process: material] deflated [Medium] the ball.

(b) [Medium] The ball [Process: material] deflated.
The Medium is defined as the ‘‘participant function through which the Process is actualized, and without which there will
be no actualization of process’’ (Matthiessen et al., 2010: 137), while the Agent is ‘‘the participant causing the actualization
of the combination of Process + Medium’’ (Matthiessen et al., 2010: 49). Accordingly, the ergative perspective allows for a
generalisation of participant roles, hence the four cause roles Initiator, Attributor, Assigner and Inducer are all treated as
Agent, functioning as an external cause.
However, the ergative analysis does not capture the distinction between lexical/direct causation and analytic
causation, as illustrated by Halliday and Matthiessen (2014: 579) through examples 6 and 7 above. Indeed, in both of
them, ‘John’ is the Agent and ‘the ball’ is the Medium, although in example 6, John directly acted on the ball and in example
7, ‘‘he may have done so by leverage, psychokinesis or some other indirect force’’ (p. 579). The transitive analysis, on the
other hand, captures this distinction, because the ball is Goal in 6 and Actor in 7, hence the difference between the two
interpretations is accounted for by the grammar.
This brief discussion leads to the conclusion that transitivity and ergativity analyses complement each other in the
study of causation, because each of them makes up for the limitations of the other perspective. Therefore, it is the
combination of the two perspectives that gives the ‘‘essential insight’’ (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014: 579), especially in
contrastive studies, as will be shown below.
2.3. Motivation for the contrastive study
While the transitivity-ergativity perspective may help get better insights into the lexicogrammatical analysis of different types
of causatives, as has been argued in the previous section, this perspective was found by Lavid and Arús Hita (2002) to be
particularly ‘‘suitable for contrastive studies’’ because it allowed them to ‘‘observe how semantically related verbs may behave
differently’’ (p. 77). Indeed, as there is a discrepancy between the real world and the semantics of languages [cf. 2.2.], it is worth
investigating how different languages may choose to encode semantically the same real world situation and how they may
have different lexicogrammatical realisations of the same meaning in the same contextual situation. Example 10 from The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain and its Arabic translation (Sellami-Baklouti, 1998: 259) may help illustrate this point:
(10) (a) But the boy's hand shook so that [he spilled his coffee]
(b)
(a) But the boy's hand shook so that. . .

he spilled his coffee
Transitive Actor Process: Material Goal
Ergative Agent Medium
(b)
wa lakinna yadahu ?irtaGashat Hatta: laqad. . .
origin
qadaHu al-qahwati minhu ?insakaba transliteration
Actor Adjunct Process: Material-Event Transitive
Medium Adjunct Process: Material-Event Ergative
the cup of coffee from him spill (intr.) Literal translation
‘The cup of coffee spilled from him’ translation
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The analysis of the bracketed clause in example 10 shows that in encoding the same situation, English and Arabic opt
for different lexicogrammatical realisations. While the process is presented as effective in English, it is encoded as middle
in Arabic. Such lexicogrammatical differences may be systemic, i.e. relevant to the options provided by different language
systems, or contextual, i.e. activated by generic and registerial situational factors. It may therefore, be useful to explore
causation in the language pair under study in a specific context. The motivation for the choice of the legal register, more
specifically website Terms of Service (TOS), for the purposes of the present study is explained in the following section.
2.4. A contextual approach
In addition to systemic differences, the variation between Arabic and English can also come ‘‘from above’’, as the
lexicogrammatical realisations of the semantics of causation can vary according to the context of use (Matthiessen, 2018).
Therefore, the present study has opted for a ‘‘trinocular perspective matching up contextual, semantic and
lexicogrammatical considerations’’ (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014: 35). In addition to a theoretical objective, aiming
to investigate the impact of the context on the semantics and lexicogrammatical realisation of causation, the contextual
approach can be seen as a methodological requirement, opting for a ‘‘practical point of view’’ (Halliday and Matthiessen,
2014: 33) by focusing the description on a particular cultural domain.
Accordingly, the present study investigates causation in a ‘‘particular cultural domain’’, i.e. website Terms of Service
(TOS), as representative of the ‘enabling’ genre aiming at ‘‘instructing people in how to undertake it or regulating the
activity by controlling people's actions’’ (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014: 36). With the advance of new technologies,
websites constitute a new form of goods and services and access to them should be regulated by some legal document,
hence the emergence of TOS. Despite some specificities of this new genre, it is similar to the contract genre, as it is a
legally binding document between a promisor and a promisee, including necessarily a ‘concluded agreement’ between
the parties and involving the acceptance of an offer (Reuters, 2014), without which the user can be denied access to the
services offered by the website.
In addition to their availability in different languages, which has made it possible to collect a parallel English-Arabic
corpus, TOS have a number of linguistic features that make them suitable for the purposes of this study. First, legal
language is claimed to be clear, precise, unambiguous and all-inclusive (Bhatia, 2006: 6). This implies that some skilful
work is undertaken by the drafters to make careful linguistic choices, thus extending choice to its conscious dimension (i.e.
not only choice in the system, but also choice activated by the generic factors) (Hasan, 2009, 2013; Sellami-Baklouti,
2013, 2018). Second, in such legally binding documents, legal responsibility for any action is established linguistically
through agency for that action (Sellami-Baklouti, 1998; Sellami-Baklouti and LeJosne, 2000); in other words, in forensic
accounts, if some given party causes an action and their agency for that action is proved, then this party will have the legal
responsibility of this action. Drawing upon this previous research on the strong relationship between responsibility and
agency, the present study argues that the establishment of the responsibility of the parties involved is lexicogrammatically
realised at the experiential level of the clause through the representation of events, actions and the participants involved in
them (hence the relevance of transitivity perspective) and through representing events and actions either as autonomous
or instigated (hence the relevance of the ergativity perspective).
To sum up, this contrastive study adopts a contextual investigation of causation, because it is based on the hypothesis
that the lexicogrammatical realisations of causation in Arabic and English, whether similarities or differences, result from
systemic differences between languages, but can also be, to some extent, subject to the influence of contextual factors,
particularly when causation is directly relevant to the communicative purposes of the genre. The following section
undertakes to test this hypothesis on a parallel corpus of English-Arabic TOS.
3. A contrastive study of a parallel corpus of website Terms of Service (TOS)
The investigation of the corpus under study starts with a contrastive description of the lexicogrammatical realisations of
causation on the two languages [3.2], followed by a register-based approach, linking these lexicogrammatical realisations
to contextual factors, [3.3].
3.1. Corpus and method
The study explores a parallel corpus of three website TOS, Facebook, CNN News and Google, totalling about 18,158
words (see Table 1). The relatively small size of the corpus and the choice of these three websites can be explained by
availability in the two languages and the frozen nature of the genre (Danet, 1980: 471), leaving little room for much lexical
and grammatical variation. This means that a small-sized corpus can be quite representative of the overall registerial
pattern.
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Table 1
Corpus description.
Arabic English Total
Facebook 3160 3502 6662

CNN news 3148 4459 7607
Google 1861 2028 3889
Total 8169 9989 18,158
Fig. 1. Process type system.
Fig. 2. Agency system.
The corpus was annotated using UAM CorpusTool (O’Donnell, 2007, Version 3.3h, which supports Arabic), following
three major schemes: the process type system (Fig. 1), the agency system (Fig. 2) and the structural type system (Fig. 3).
The structural type system specifies whether the causative verb is lexical, analytic or morphological, with morphological
affixation being a major and regular lexicogrammatical realisation of causation in Arabic, as will be outlined in [3.2].
This annotation is useful for the quantitative analysis undertaken in [3.3], explaining lexicogrammatical realisations of
causation by contextual factors relevant to the TOS genre, but beforehand, section [3.2] focusses on the semantic and
lexicogrammatical strata, exploring systemic similarities and differences between the two languages in their
lexicogrammatical realisation of causation.
3.2. A contrastive analysis of causation: a systemic approach
At this level of the study, the focus of the analysis is on the lexicogrammatical realisation types of causation in the two
languages. Both Arabic and English can express causation using:
(i) Lexical means,3 as in

(11) (a) John rolled the ball.
(b)
daHraja zaydun al-kurata
rolled Zayd the ball
(ii) Morphological means, through regular affixation, as for example; beauty ! beautify, capital ! capitalize, bright -
! brighten/ hadima (be ruined, FormI, faGila) ! haddama (ruin, Form II, faGGala), DHaHika (laugh, Form I,
faGila) ! ?aDHHaka (make s.o. laugh, Form IV, ?afGala), and
3
The examples that are not extracted from the corpus are invented for the purpose of clarification.
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Fig. 3. Structural type system.
(iii) Analytic means, through the use of a hypotactic verbal group complex, as for example:
(12) (a) John made the ball roll.
jaGala zaydun al-kurata tatadaHraju

made Zayd the ball roll
However, these lexicogrammatical resources are used variably by the two languages. While analytic and lexical
resources are used by both languages, making a significant distinction between direct and indirect causation (Halliday
and Matthiessen, 2014: 579), Arabic and English differ mainly on morphological resources, entailing a major difference in
the causation system.
3.2.1. Lexical vs. analytic causation

Analytic causatives have a low frequency in the corpus in the two languages compared to other types and they are less
frequent in Arabic than in English (12 instances in Arabic and 37 in English, with CorpusTool displaying a x2 = +++>98%).
Similar results were found in scientific and literary registers (Sellami-Baklouti, 1998), which would allow for a preliminary
generalisation of this pattern in the two languages. Analytic causatives are verbal group complexes of expansion,
including the feature of causation (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014: 578). The corpus displays two major types of
expansion: extending, where the service or the service provider is presented as a facilitator of the process to be carried out
by the user (examples 13 and 14), or enhancing where the legal drafter dictates the user's actions, either through high
agency (example 15) or low agency4 (example 16)
(13) (a) We encourage you to read the Data Policy, and to use it to help you make informed decisions
(b)
nushajjiGuka Gala: qira:?ati siya:sati ?al-baya:nati wa ?al-?istiGa:nati
we-encourage-you to reading policy- of the-data and getting-help
biha: li-musa:Gadatika Gala: ?ittixa:dhi qara:ra:tin mustani:ratin
with-it to-helping-you with taking decisions informed
(14) (a) Facebook offers social reporting tools to enable users to provide feedback about tagging.
(b)
yuqadimu facebook ?adawe:ti ?ible:GHin ?ijtime:Giyatin li-tamki:ni ?al-mustaxdimina
presents facebook tools-of reporting social for-enabling the-users
min taqdi:mi mula:HaDa:tin Hawla ?al-?isharati
to presenting remarks about the-tagging
(15) (a) We require applications to respect your privacy.

(b)
naHnu nuTa:libu ?at-taTbi:qa:ti bi-?iHtira:mi xuSu:Siyati-ka
we require The-applications to-respecting privacy-your
4
Halliday and Matthiessen (2014: 580) classify enhancing causative group complexes into three types of agency: high, median and low. Based
on the examples they provide in Table 8-6, high agency (e.g. make. . .do) denotes more coercion than median agency (e.g. have . . . do) and low
agency (let . . . do).
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(16) (a) You also permit any other user to access, view, store or reproduce the User Content for that
user's personal use.
(b)
wa tasmaHu-you ?ayDHan li-?ayi mustaxdimin ?a:xara li-?al-wuSu:li ?ila: wa
and Permit-you also to-any user other to-access to and
GarDHi wa taxzi:ni ?aw ?iGa:dati ?inta:ji muHtawa: ?al-mustaxdimi
view and store or repeat production-(of) content-(of) the-user
li-?istixda:mi hadha: ?al-fardi ?ash-shaxSiyi
to-use-(of) this person personal
Examples 13--16 show how in both languages, extending and enhancing verbal group complexes serve the two main
purposes of the enabling genre of the corpus. While extending verbal group complexes are used with the purpose of
‘‘instructing people in how to undertake it’’, enhancing verbal group complexes have the purpose of ‘‘regulating the activity
by controlling people's actions’’ (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014: 36).
In addition to these examples, the corpus displays instances of variation between the two languages. This variation can
be seen when an analytic causative in English corresponds to a morphological causative in Arabic waffara (Form II
faGGala) derived from wafura (Form I faGula), as in Example 17:
(17) (a) . . . we mean the features and services we make available.

(b)
‘al-mi:za:tu wa ‘al-xadamatu al-lati nuwaffiruha:
the-features and the-services that we-provide-them
A higher degree of divergence is detected when the high agency causative process in English corresponds to an
existential process in Arabic, which expresses the same degree of modality as in the English text, but does so in an
impersonal way, as illustrated by example 18:
(18) (a) During the registration process, you may be required to choose a password and/or user name.
(b)
qad taku:nu huna:ka Hajatun li-?ixtiya:ri kalimati muru:rin
may be is there a-need to-choosing word-(of) passing
?athna:’a Gamaliyati ?at-tasji:li
during process-(of) registration
(Translation: There may be a need to choose a password during the process of registration)
The variation between the two languages illustrated by these examples accounts for the observed lower frequency of
analytic causatives in Arabic (12 vs. 37). This observation can lead to the conclusion that despite the availability of analytic
causatives in both languages, English displays a higher frequency of their use. This is consistent with variations between
English and French (François, 1989; Sellami-Baklouti, 1998), as illustrated by example 19:
(19) (a) By-and-by she gave up and let her hands drop.
(b) Petit à petit elle céda et baissa les mains.
Little by little she gave up and dropped the hands.
While in the case of the English-French pair, this discrepancy is explained by the richness of causative operators in
English, compared to French (François, 1989), in the case of English-Arabic, this may be accounted for by the richness of
morphological causatives in Arabic.
3.2.2. Morphological causatives

Both Arabic and English can express causation through morphological derivation, but with varying degrees, as it is
more regular and productive in Arabic than in English. Accordingly, this section will briefly illustrate morphological
causatives in the English sub-corpus and then will elaborate on how this resource is used by the legal drafters in the Arabic
sub-corpus.
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In English, only a few affixes are used to add causative meaning to nouns or adjectives, such as the suffixes --ify, -ize,
-en and the prefixes en- and dis-. Examples 20 and 21 illustrate these affixes:
(20) You will not share your password (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your
account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.
(21) If you are using a Google Account assigned to you by an administrator, different or additional terms may apply
and your administrator may be able to access or disable your account.
In Arabic, however, morphological causation is part of a general system of verbal patterns, which ‘‘constitute a
semogenic (meaning-making) resource within the grammar of the verb- a resource for deriving new words according to
established patterns’’ (Bardi, 2008: 256). Indeed, there are fifteen verbal patterns in Arabic (Bardi, 2008), which are
morphologically derived through affixation or vowel change from the triliteral root ‫ف‬/f, ‫ ع‬/G, and ‫ ل‬/l. Each of these forms
conveys an inventory of meanings5. Among these fifteen forms, the following patterns can be used to express causation:
1. Form I: faGala
There are two possibilities where Form I faGala expresses causation:
(i) Either the effective form corresponds to a middle form, through vowel change (faGila ! faGala). The morphological
process involved here is conversion, with zero affixation and only a phonological change occurring; e.g. nashira (be
posted) ! nashara (post)
(22)
wa ‘at-taGliqa:tu ‘al-lati tanshuruha:
and the-comments that you-post-them
(Translation: . . . and the comments that you post)
(ii) The effective form has no corresponding middle form; e.g. Hadhafa (delete). In this case, the verb is considered as a
lexical causative, because there is no morphologically marked systematic relation between a middle form and a
causative form:
(23)
yantahi: tarxi:Su ?al-muHtawa: ?al-maHmi: hadha Gindama: taHdhifu
ends Licence-(of) the-content IP this when delete (you)
?al-muHtawa: ?al-maHmi: ?al-xa:Si-bika

content IP your
(Translation: This IP License ends when you delete your IP content)
2. Form II: faGGala derived from faGala/faGula/faGila, through infixation/doubling the internal consonant: xaraja (go
out) ! xarraja (make go out); sahula (be easy) ! sahhala (make easy); qadima (come) ! qaddama (cause to
come). Example 24 displays the nominal infinitival form (tafGi:li) of the verb sahhala ! tashi:li
(24)
Gadamu tashi:li HuSu:li ?ayyi ?intiha:ka:tin li-hadha: ?al-baya:ni
not facilitating happening-(of) any violations of-this statement
3. Form IV: ?afGala derived from faGala/faGila, through prefixation; e.g. nasha?a (come into being) ! ?ansha?a
(create). Example 25 displays the nominal infinitival form (?ifGa:li) of the verb ?ansha?a ! ?insha:?i
(25)
Gadamu ?insha:?i ?akthara min Hisa:bin shaxSiyin wa:Hidin
not creating more than account personal one
5
For an inventory of these meanings, see Bardi (2008, pp. 256--257).
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It is worth noting that Form II (faGGala) is the most frequently used in the corpus to convey causative meaning, which is
in line with Sellami-Baklouti's findings (1998) about the frequency of Form II in the scientific register. A number of reasons
can account for this. The first is the fact that among the three verbal patterns that convey causation, Form II is the only one
that is exclusively effective, while Form I and Form IV can be used either as middle or effective (Bardi, 2008). Second,
while Form IV is used to derive causative forms only from the triliteral roots faGala and faGila, Form II is also used to derive
the causative form of the triliteral roots faGula; e.g. SaGuba (be difficult) ! SaGGaba (make difficult), while ?aSGaba
(Form IV) is a middle verb synonymous with SaGuba. This implies that Form II is more regular and productive as a
causative form. In addition to these formal factors, the higher frequency of Form II can be explained by its aspectual
features. El-Moutaoukil (1987) argues that when Form II and Form IV are both available to derive causative meaning from
a triliteral root, Form II conveys more intensity and repetitiveness and denotes that the causer has more control over the
process. He gives the following example to illustrate this point:
(26)
(a)
?afhamtu xa:lidan ?ad-darsa bi-surGatin

explained-I Khalid the-lesson quickly
(b)
*** fahhamtu xa:lidan ?ad-darsa bi-surGatin

***explained-I Khalid the-lesson quickly
Both ?afhama (i.e. explain: Form IV) in 26)a and fahhama (i.e. explain: Form II) in 26)b are causative forms derived
from the triliteral Form fahima (understand: faGila). However, Form IV collocates easily with the adverbial quickly, while
this collocation is less acceptable in the case of Form II. This contrast between a and b in example 26 shows that Form II
conveys more intensity and repetitiveness than Form IV, which makes it incompatible with the adverb quickly. This
intensive and repetitive aspect of Form II can explain its frequency in the corpus, as it can be used to emphasize the
agency and hence the responsibility of the parties involved in the Terms. Example 27 illustrates this point:
(27)
wa tuwaDHDHiHa ?annak (wa laysa facebook) tajmaGu maGlu:ma:tihim

and make clear-you that-you and not Facebook are-collecting Information-their
While Form II waDHDHaha and Form IV ?awDHaha can be derived from the triliteral root, both conveying the causative
meaning (make clear) of the middle form waDHuha (be clear), the legal drafter in Example 27 chooses Form II, which
conveys more intensity to emphasize the agency of the user to make clear that they are responsible for collecting the
information. This responsibility is further emphasized by the parenthetical negation of Facebook's responsibility, avoiding
thus any ambiguity or lack of precision (cf. Bhatia, 2006).
To sum up, this section has shown that while both English and Arabic have morphological means to express causation,
this resource is more regular and productive in Arabic than in English, which is quite predictable from the fact that Arabic is
morphologically richer than English. This typological difference engenders a systemic difference concerning ergativity in
the two languages.
3.2.3. A contrastive perspective on ergativity

The ergative perspective is useful in English to explain the behaviour of verbs which can be used either as middle or
effective, depending on whether they are used transitively or intransitively, c.f. Examples 8 (a) and (b) above (Thompson,
2014: 141), repeated here:
(8) (a) [Actor] He [Process: material] deflated [Goal] the ball.

(b) [Actor] The ball [Process: material] deflated.
Verbs like deflate are quite frequent in English, as ‘‘in a random sample of 100 verbs taken from a standard dictionary,
60 per cent were labelled vb, trans & intrans’, among them being almost all those of high frequency’’ (Halliday and
Matthiessen, 2014: 337). In such situations, the same verb expresses the process, ‘‘but the structure varies to reflect the
presence or absence of causation’’ (Thompson, 2014: 141). This perspective has also been particularly useful in
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contrastive studies to compare the behaviour of verbs in pairs of languages, such as English-Spanish (Lavid and Arús
Hita, 2002), and English-Japanese (Chik, 2018).
While this perspective can be applied to English, it is not applicable to Arabic, because unlike English, the same verb
cannot be both transitive and intransitive in Arabic. Indeed, in Arabic verbs are classified into the potentially middle and the
potentially effective/causative (Bardi, 2008), and morphological processes are used for derivation in the two directions; i.e.
to make a middle verb effective (example 28), or to make an effective verb middle (example 29):
(28)
(a) Root: xaraja (Form I: faGala: Middle)
xaraja xa:lidun mina ?al-Hafli

went out-(he) Khalid from the-party
(b) Derived Form IV: ?axraja (?afGala: Effective)
?axarajtu xa:lidan mina ?al-Hafli

made-go out-(I) Khalid from the-party
(c) Derived Form II: xarraja (faGGala: Effective)
xarrajtu xa:lidan mina ?al-Hafli

make-go out-(I) Khalid from the-party
(29)
(a) Root: kasara (Form I: faGala: Effective)
kasara ?al-waladu ?al-ka?sa

broke-(he) the-boy the-glass
(b) Derived Form V: takassara (tafaGGala: Middle)
takassara ?al-ka?su
broke-(it) the-glass
c) Derived Form VII: ?inkasara (?infaGala: Middle)
?inkasara ?al-ka?su
broke-(it) the-glass
In example 28, the root faGala is middle; Form II and Form IV are used to derive the effective causative form. On the
other hand, in example 29, the root faGala is effective, so Form V tafaGGala and form VII ?infaGala are used to derive the
middle correspondent. In this morphological process illustrated by examples 29, the affix is attached to root to denote
‘‘decausativization’’ (François, 1989), making the verb morphologically richer, but semantically poorer.
Following this contrastive analysis, some conclusions may be drawn about commonalities and divergences between
English and Arabic concerning causation. While the two languages share three systems: the process type system, the
agency system and the structural type system (illustrated by Figs. 1--3, respectively), they differ on two systems. On the
one hand, English has an additional causation system, ‘‘concerned with the variable of instigation’’ (Lavid and Arús Hita,
2002: 83). This system will distinguish ergative verbs, which can be used either transitively or intransitively, from verbs
where the process cannot be instigated. On the other hand, Arabic has an additional verbal pattern system, which offers
an entry of choices between different options to realise causative or decausativized meanings. Fig. 4 shows common and
divergent systems in the two languages.
Any choice in the systems displayed in Fig. 4 is conditioned by typological factors; i.e. whether the system is relevant to
the language or not, but these typological factors may not be the only conditioning factor. Indeed, given the trinocular
perspective, the present study hypothesizes that semantic and lexicogrammatical choices in the expression of causation
may also be conditioned by contextual factors; i.e. generic and registerial factors making some entries in the system more
probable than others. The following section will explore the impact of the ‘enabling’ nature of the corpus on the semantics
and lexicogrammatical realisation of causation.
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Fig. 4. A contrastive description of causation in Arabic-English.
3.3. A genre-based approach to causation
At this level, lexicogrammatical choices in the two languages are studied in terms of contextual factors relevant to the
genre of the corpus. The first angle of analysis focuses on process type and agency and the second angle addresses the
distribution of effective processes according to participants.
3.3.1. Process type and agency

Table 2 shows the distribution of processes according to their types in the two languages (Fig. 1); and Table 3 shows
their distribution according to the Agency system, i.e. whether the process is effective or middle (Fig. 2):
Tables 2 and 3 show that material and effective processes are the most frequent types in both sub-corpora with a highly
significant x2 (x2 = +++>98%, according to UAM CorpusTool, Version 3.3h, statistics). Examples 30 a and b illustrate this:
(30)
(a) We are constantly changing and improving our Services.
We are (constantly) changing and improving constantly our Services
Transitive Actor Process: Material Process: Material Circumstance Goal
Ergative Agent Process: Material Process: Material Circumstance Medium
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Table 2
Distribution of process types.
Arabic (%) English (%)
Material 66 59
Relational 22 31
Verbal 12 10
Table 3
Distribution of processes according to Agency.
Arabic (%) English (%)
Effective 89 94
Middle 10 6
(b)
?innana: nuGHayiru xadama:tina: bi-?istimrarin wa-nuHassinuha:
Original
wa-nuHassinuha: bi-?istimrarin xadama:tina: nuGHayiru ?innana: Transliteration
and- improve-(we)-them constantly services-our Change (we) indeed + we Literal translation
Process: Material + Goal Circumstance Goal Process: Material + Actor Transitive
Process: Material + Medium Circumstance Medium Process: Material + Agent Ergative
In both sub-corpora, two material effective processes (change and improve) are combined in a verbal group complex in
Example 30. This combination is to a certain extent pleonastic given that change/GHayara are redundant because their
meaning is already included in improve, which means ‘change to a better condition’. This use of doublets, which is a
common feature of legal discourse (Danet, 1980), is meant to emphasize the services offered by the website. This
emphasis is also conveyed in both English and Arabic by the circumstantial adjunct of manner constantly/bi-?istimrarin
and further enhanced in Arabic by the emphatic sentence particle ?inna (= indeed).
The dominance of material processes similar to those illustrated by Example 30 in both sub-corpora can be explained
by the fact that they offer a resource for enumerating ‘doings’; in other words, what the service provider has done for the
benefit of the user. On the other hand, agency is a resource to stress the responsibility of the service provider for these
‘good’ doings. Middle processes are scarce in the corpus, and even when they are used, there is a tendency to enhance
the middle process by an effective process in clause complex, as illustrated by example 31 (a and b, with their respective
analyses):
(31)
(a) This IP License ends when you delete your IP content.
a This IP License ends xb when you delete your IP content
Transitive Actor Proc. Mater Actor Proc. Mate Goal
Ergative Medium Agent Medium
(b)
yantahi tarxiSu ?al-muHtawa: ?al-maHmi: hadha: Gindama: taHdhifu ?al-muHtawa: ?al-maHmi: ?al-xa:Si bika
a original
?al-muHtawa: taHdhifu xb Gindama: tarxiSu ?al-muHtawa: yantahi transliteration

?al-maHmi: ?al-maHmi: hadha:
?al-xa:Si bika
IP-content-your Delete (you) xb when Licence-IP-this ends Literal translation
Goal Process: Material + Actor Actor Transitive
Medium Process + Agent Medium Ergative
This tendency can be explained by the motivation to put more focus on instigators than on events in order to avoid any
ambiguity in establishing agency, hence the responsibility for ‘doings’, which may be determined by the nature of the
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‘enabling’ genre of the corpus, requiring language to be clear, precise, unambiguous and all-inclusive (Bhatia, 2006: 6).
This argument can be further supported by the bracketed clauses in Examples 32 a and b, where an Agent/Assigner is
introduced in the clause:
(32)
(a) . . . as well as Facebook brands, products and services, [which we call the ‘‘Facebook Services’’ or ‘‘Services’’].
. . .. which we call the ‘‘Facebook Services’’ or ‘‘Services’’
Transitive Token Assigner Process: Relational Value
Ergative Medium Agent Range
(b)
wa- ?allati: nuTliqu Galaiha: ?ijma:lan musamma: ‘xadamat facebook’ ?aw ‘?al-xadama:t’
. . .. original
musamma: ‘xadamat facebook’ ?ijma:lan nuTliqu Galaiha: wa- ?allati: Transliteration

?aw ‘al-xadama:t’
the label ‘facebook services’ generally give (we) -them- and-which ... Literal translation
or services
Value Adjunct Process: Relational + Assigner Token Transitive
Range Process + Agent Medium Ergative
This structure, where the legal drafter assigns definitions to the most important labels used in the terms is a common
resource in contracts, ‘‘especially in the definition section, to identify which token is associated with which value’’ (Halioui,
2018: 179), meeting thus a characteristic feature of TOS and contracts, that of disambiguating terminology.
It may be concluded from this discussion that the agency of the service provider is stressed in material processes to
enumerate doings and in relational processes to define terminology from the legal drafter's perspective in order to avoid
any ambiguity in the TOS. While the agency of the service provider for doings is stressed through doublets and emphatic
particles (as was shown in example 30), many instances in the corpus show that the agency of the service user is
constrained through modality, as can be seen in example 33:
(33)
(a) You may download copyrighted material for your personal use only.
You may download copyrighted material for your personal use only
Transitive Actor Process: material Goal Circumstance
(b)
yumkinuka taHmi:lu ?al-mawa:di dha:ti Huquqi ?al-milkiyati li-?istixda:mika ?ash-shaxSiyi faqaT
original
li-?istixda:mika ? ?al-mawa:di dha:ti Huquqi ?al-milkiyati yumkinuka taHmi:lu transliteration
a-shaxSi faqaT
for-use-your- Material-with-copyright (You) are allowed to download Literal translation
personal only
Circumstance Goal Process: material + Actor Transitive
Medium Process: material + Agent Ergative
Although an effective material process is used in example 33, the use of modality endows it with potentiality, which
implies that the agency of the service user is constrained by regulations put by the service provider. This calls for a closer
investigation of effective processes in relation to their participants as well as their modality and polarity.
3.3.2. Effective processes and participants

The second step of the contextual analysis addresses the distribution of effective processes according to participants,
with a focus on the two parties involved in the TOS, namely the service provider (represented as we- us- our services --
website name) and the service user (mainly represented by you). Table 4 shows the distribution of effective processes
according to whether the Agent is the service provider or the service user.
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Table 4
Distribution of effective processes according to participant's agency.
Us (service provider) You (user)
Arabic 63 113
English 109 156
While the preliminary results in Table 4 show that the agency of the user exceeds the agency of the provider, a closer
look, shows, with a high statistical significance (x2 = +++>98%), that 72 out of 113 effective processes in Arabic (i.e. 63%)
and 82 out of 156 effective processes in English (i.e. 52%) are nonveridical, i.e. either in negative or in a conditional form
(Klima, 1964), as can be seen in examples 34 (a) and (b):
(34)
(a) If you do not agree to these Terms of Use, you should not access or use the Site.
If you do not agree to these Terms of Use you should not access or use the Site
Transitive Actor - Process: Material + Material Range
- Modal value: High
(b) CNNArabic.com
?idha: kunta la: tuwa:fiqu Gala: shuru:Ti ?al-xidmati hadhihi yajibu ?an la: taSila ?aw tastaxdima CNNArabic.
com
CNNArabic.com original
CNNArabic.com yajibu ?an la: taSila ?dha: kunta la: tuwa:fiqu transliteration
?aw tastaxdima Gala: shuru:Ti ?al-xidmati hadhihi
CNNArabic.com Should-not-access (you) If do-not-agree (you) to Literal translation
or use (you) terms-of-service-these
Range - Process: Material + Material ... Transitive
- Modal value: High
+ Actor
Medium - Process: Material + Material Ergative
- Modal value: High
+ Agent
Examples 34 a and b show that the service provider is dictating the terms of use through constraining the user's agency
for some actions by putting conditions for their use of the service/end of this use. Example 35 further illustrates this point:
(35) (a) If you repeatedly infringe other people's intellectual property rights, we will disable your account when
appropriate.
xb if you repeatedly infringe other people's intellectual
property rights
Transitive Actor Circumstance: Manner Process: Material Goal
a we will disable your account when appropriate
Transitive Actor Process: Material Goal Circumstance: Location
(b)
?dha: ?intahakta Huquqi ?al-milkiyati ?al-fikriyati li-?ashxa:Sin ?a:xari:na Gala: naHwin mutakarririn fa-sa-naqu:mu bi-
taGTi:li Hisa:bika Hi:nama: yaku:nu muna:siban
Original
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Gala: naHwin mutakarririn Huquqi ?al- ?intahakta ?dha: Transliteration

milkiyati ?al-
fikriyati li-?
ashxa:Sin ?a:
xari:na
in-way-repeated rights-of- infringe (you) if Literal translation
property-
intellectual of
people-other
Circumstance: Manner Goal Process: Material + Actor Transitive
Medium Process: Material + Agent Ergative
a Original
Hi:nama: yaku:nu muna:siban Hisa:bika fa-sa-naqu:mu bi-taGTi:li Transliteration
When is (it) appropriate Account-your then-will-do the-disabling Literal translation
(we)
Circumstance: Location Goal Process: Material + Actor Transitive
Medium Process: Material + Agent Ergative
Examples 35 a and b show that while the agency of the user is a condition, the agency of the service provider is affirmed
through actions. The same pattern of affirming the service provider agency and constraining the user's one illustrated by
examples 34 and 35 is found in a study of Life Insurance Contracts (Halioui, 2018) and may be considered a characteristic
feature of the legal genre, where the purpose is to make the users aware of their rights and duties.
To sum up, the analysis shows that material processes constitute a resource for the service provider to regulate the use
of the website services. The ergative perspective has shown that the agency of the service provider is present not only in
material processes but also in relational processes, where the service provider acts as an Assigner, with the aim of
avoiding any ambiguity in the interpretation of terms. Complementing the experiential analysis with an interpersonal one,
the combination of effective processes with negative polarity and high modal values has shown that the service provider
imposes/negates actions to be undertaken by the service user, limiting thus their agency. This implies that the legal drafter
has an advantage position over the service user, leaving them ‘‘little opportunity for bargaining’’, and offering the service to
the consumer on a ‘‘take it or leave it’’ basis (Reuters, 2014).
4. Conclusions and future perspectives
The present study has tried to contribute to a ‘‘research agenda’’ concerned with ‘‘developing comprehensive descriptions
of multilingual meaning potentials’’ (Matthiessen, 2018: 111). Based on a parallel English-Arabic corpus of website TOS, an
attempt has been made at exploring commonalities and divergences between the two languages in their lexicogrammatical
realisation of causative meaning. The investigation has first focussed on the semantics and lexicogrammar of causation,
showing some points of divergence between the two languages at the level of lexicogrammatical realisation, which can be
explained by the typological features of the two languages. A first point of divergence is observed at the level of the structural
type of causative verbs. While the two languages can express causation using lexical, morphological or analytic verbal
structures, these resources have varying frequencies in the corpus with analytic causatives being more frequent in English
than in Arabic and morphological causatives being more frequent in Arabic than in English. These varying frequencies, which
confirm the findings of other studies (François, 1989; Sellami-Baklouti, 1998; Sellami-Baklouti and LeJosne, 2000), may
reflect general probabilities in the systems of the two languages. Although, for ‘‘practical reasons’’, the present study has
focused on legal register as a ‘‘particular cultural domain’’ (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014: 33), more studies exploring other
cultural domains are needed to further investigate this typological variation.
A higher degree of divergence concerns the system of causation which proved to be useful in the contrastive
investigation of English-Spanish pair and not being applicable to Arabic, because the same verb cannot be transitive or
intransitive depending on the structure of the clause (cf. [3.2.3.]). This divergence has engendered the need to devise
systems, which are specific to individual languages, in addition to common systems (cf. Fig. 4), modifying thus the original
system based on the English language (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014). The finding confirms Arús-Hita's argument (this
volume) that the investigation of the grammar of languages other than English on which SFL reference books were based
can lead to enriching SFL theoretical constructs and the tools adopted in grammatical descriptions. The present
exploratory research of causation can pave the way for more contrastive studies investigating other systems. Such
studies will aim to not only provide descriptions of multilingual meaning systems, but also contribute to developing SFL
theoretical constructs and descriptive tools.
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Extending the investigation to the higher stratum of context, the study has then explored the effect of generic features of
website TOS on the lexicogrammatical realisation of causation, with the aim of ‘‘matching up contextual, semantic and
lexicogrammatical considerations’’ in a ‘‘trinocular perspective’’ (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014: 35). This second phase of
the analysis has shown that the impact of contextual factors is cross-linguistic, as they account for the commonalities
between the two languages in the meanings expressed in the two sub-corpora and which are dictated by the purposes of
the enabling genre. This finding confirms, in a contrastive perspective, the higher position of the context stratum activating
semantics (Hasan, 2009; Sellami-Baklouti, 2013) and calls for the need to take into account ‘‘typological constraints as well
as cross-linguistic register constraints’’ (Teich, 2003: 61) in contrastive studies. The present study focussed on TOS, as
representative of the legal register and the enabling genre, but further studies can investigate other registers and genres.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have
appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Appendix A. Key to the transliteration of the Arabic Alphabet
Letter Transliteration
?a
‫ب‬ ba
‫ت‬ ta
‫ث‬ tha
‫ج‬ ja
‫ح‬ Ha
‫خ‬ xa
‫د‬ da
‫ذ‬ dha
‫ر‬ ra
‫ز‬ za
‫ش‬ sha
‫ص‬ Sa
‫ض‬ Dha
‫ط‬ Ta
‫ظ‬ Da
‫ع‬ Ga
‫غ‬ GHa
‫ف‬ Fa
‫ق‬ qa
‫ك‬ ka
‫ل‬ la
‫م‬ ma
‫ن‬ na
‫ه‬ ha
‫و‬ wa
‫ي‬ ya
Appendix B. Links to the corpus
- https://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/06/world/terms-service/index.html.
- https://arabic.cnn.com/terms.
- https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms/previous?ref=new_policy.
- https://www.google.com/intl/en_US/policies/terms/archive/20131111-20140414/.
- https://policies.google.com/terms?gl=US&hl=ar.
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lingua.2019.102782

Baklouti, A. - Ergativity

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LINGUA-102782; No. of Pages 18

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Transitivity-ergativity perspectives on causation in

Keywords: English; Arabic; Contrastive study; Ergativity; Transitivity; Causation

E-mail address: Akila.sellami@flshs.usf.tn.

2 A. Sellami-Baklouti / Lingua xxx (2019) 102782

2.1. Causative verbs and causative situations

(1) a. I (Causer) sent John (Causee) to the drugstore

A. Sellami-Baklouti / Lingua xxx (2019) 102782 3

Causative predicate formation

(1) b. John went to the drugstore.

2.2. An SFL perspective on causation

(2) That noise (Attributor) is driving me crazy.

(6) John rolled the ball.

4 A. Sellami-Baklouti / Lingua xxx (2019) 102782

(8) (a) [Actor] He [Process: material] deflated [Goal] the ball.

(9) (a) [Agent] He [Process: material] deflated [Medium] the ball.

2.3. Motivation for the contrastive study

(a) But the boy's hand shook so that. . .

A. Sellami-Baklouti / Lingua xxx (2019) 102782 5

2.4. A contextual approach

3. A contrastive study of a parallel corpus of website Terms of Service (TOS)

3.1. Corpus and method

6 A. Sellami-Baklouti / Lingua xxx (2019) 102782

Arabic English Total

Facebook 3160 3502 6662

Fig. 1. Process type system.

Fig. 2. Agency system.

3.2. A contrastive analysis of causation: a systemic approach

(i) Lexical means,3 as in

A. Sellami-Baklouti / Lingua xxx (2019) 102782 7

Fig. 3. Structural type system.

jaGala zaydun al-kurata tatadaHraju

3.2.1. Lexical vs. analytic causation

(15) (a) We require applications to respect your privacy.

8 A. Sellami-Baklouti / Lingua xxx (2019) 102782

(17) (a) . . . we mean the features and services we make available.

3.2.2. Morphological causatives

A. Sellami-Baklouti / Lingua xxx (2019) 102782 9

?al-muHtawa: ?al-maHmi: ?al-xa:Si-bika

(Translation: This IP License ends when you delete your IP content)

10 A. Sellami-Baklouti / Lingua xxx (2019) 102782

?afhamtu xa:lidan ?ad-darsa bi-surGatin

*** fahhamtu xa:lidan ?ad-darsa bi-surGatin

wa tuwaDHDHiHa ?annak (wa laysa facebook) tajmaGu maGlu:ma:tihim

3.2.3. A contrastive perspective on ergativity

(8) (a) [Actor] He [Process: material] deflated [Goal] the ball.

A. Sellami-Baklouti / Lingua xxx (2019) 102782 11

xaraja xa:lidun mina ?al-Hafli

?axarajtu xa:lidan mina ?al-Hafli

xarrajtu xa:lidan mina ?al-Hafli

kasara ?al-waladu ?al-ka?sa

12 A. Sellami-Baklouti / Lingua xxx (2019) 102782

Fig. 4. A contrastive description of causation in Arabic-English.

3.3. A genre-based approach to causation

3.3.1. Process type and agency

A. Sellami-Baklouti / Lingua xxx (2019) 102782 13

Arabic (%) English (%)

Arabic (%) English (%)

?al-muHtawa: taHdhifu xb Gindama: tarxiSu ?al-muHtawa: yantahi transliteration

14 A. Sellami-Baklouti / Lingua xxx (2019) 102782

musamma: ‘xadamat facebook’ ?ijma:lan nuTliqu Galaiha: wa- ?allati: Transliteration