Voice shift of causative verbs in a corpus of texts

The same event in the physical world can be represented differently on the linguistic level. Language offers to its speakers many possible constructions to express the same event or relation. This paper deals with the case of the causal relation for which English as any other language offers a wide variety of linguistic means of expression (verbs, prepositions, conjunctions...). Dealing with all these linguistic means needs a wider space than the scope of this paper. So, we are going to focus our attention on the study of the causative verb, especially the different forms it may take i.e. active vs. passive voice. What determines the choice of the speaker between the active and the passive form of causative verbs. The two forms are semantically equivalent, so we are going to try to answer the question from a pragmatic point of view. Our conclusions will be based on statistical tests carried on a corpus of texts.