The goal of this article is to understand the syntax of Icelandic indirect causatives (ICs), especially with respect to the implicit causee. We show that the complement of the causative verb must be at least as large as a VoiceP, and that it shares some properties with active VoicePs and others with passive VoicePs. We make sense of this state of affairs by proposing that the causee, while phonetically silent, has an explicit syntactic representation, but as a φP rather than a DP. We further propose that ICs are built by stacking a second VoiceP on top of the lexical verb’s first VoiceP, and that this configuration, along with the underspecified interpretation of φP, leads to a special thematic interpretation of both the causer and the implicit causee. Our analysis suggests that there are certain core ingredients involved in building ICs—such as stacked VoicePs and an underspecified causee—but that the source of these ingredients can vary across languages and constructions, depending on the formal primitives that grammars make available to the languages more generally.

中文翻译：

---

冰岛间接成因的隐性论证

本文的目的是了解冰岛间接成因（IC）的语法，尤其是在隐性因果方面。我们表明，使动词的补语必须至少与VoiceP一样大，并且它与主动VoiceP共享某些属性，而与被动VoiceP共享其他属性。通过提出原因，我们认为原因虽然在语音上是沉默的，但具有显式的语法表示形式，但是作为φP而不是DP。我们进一步建议，通过在词汇动词的第一个VoiceP之上堆叠第二个VoiceP来构建IC，并且这种配置以及对φP的未指定解释会导致原因和隐含原因的特殊主题解释。