I got an email the other day that flummoxed me. The sender - I suspect he is still in school - wanted to know something about causative verbs. I forget just what. But it wasn't some detail that gave me problems. Before I could even attempt to answer, I had to ask myself: what are these "causative verbs"?
Until that email from Calcutta I had literally never heard of them. I don't remember as a schoolboy ever being taught English grammar. I must have been, I suppose, but it can only have been grammar of the most elementary sort: what is a noun, an adjective, a verb, a preposition, that sort of thing.
What I learned at school was something quite different - the use of English: not its rules or its countless irregularities, but the ways these work in practice. And most of that knowledge came not from any teacher or textbook but from talking and listening, reading and writing. I have never felt deprived as a result.
I felt so still less when I googled to discover what causative verbs may be. The answer, guess what, is that they are verbs describing how one person causes another (or, less often, himself) to do something or act in some way: words such as cause, make, force, get, require, command, have (as in I had the garage wash my car), help, and many more. Or, less often, not to do something, as with prevent or forbid.
Some of these words are followed directly by the verb specifying the activity concerned: I had them wash it or I made them wash it. Some require the normal infinitive form of that verb: I caused them to wash it, I forced them to wash it. After help you can use either form: I helped them wash it, I helped them to wash it. And some such words need the -ing form of the "action" verb: I stopped them washing it. With others you must also add from before that - ing form: I deterred them from washing it.
And just what have you learned from the two paragraphs above? In my view, nothing of any importance whatever - except, of course, for passing exams with.
The list of causative verbs is as long as a piece of string; that is, as any grammarian or his textbook may care to make it. What about I talked them into washing it? Or persuaded or provoked? And why bother to categorize verbs in this way? The fact that these ones are causative (or kind-of causative, or preventive) is of no significance; and be told it is of no help to anyone learning English.
If all these words were followed by, say, the infinitive of the "action" verb, lumping them into one category might be useful as a guide to their grammar. But they aren't, so it isn't. One might as well (some fool has probably done it) concoct a list of "motive verbs" - go, come, run, walk, hasten, dawdle, fly, travel, etc, etc, etc. What use would it be? None. How would it help the learner of English? It wouldn't.
The study of grammar can be useful, and textbooks employ plenty of useful categories: noun, singular, plural, pronoun, adjective, verb, mood, indicative, subjunctive, tense, preposition, and so on. These serve a genuine purpose. The invention of utterly bogus categories serves none, except to fill pages in textbooks or websites, and the pockets of publishers. And to waste the time, and addle the brains, of pupils, teachers and examiners alike.
