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This paper focuses on one famous example of an alternation that has been supposed to depend on telicity, the causative manner-of-motion alternation in English John ran the dog *(to the park). One standard approach has taken telicity to be central to the possibility of causative formation. We argue here that although telicity can be a property of these constructions, it is not necessary for the formation of a motion causative in English. Rather, what licenses the alternation is the availability of a specific syntactic structure, containing a small clause, interacting with non-telicity-related semantic restrictions imposed by verb meanings.
