The Nonsynonymy of kill and cause to die

Abstract

Jerry Fodor has claimed that kill & cause to die do not come from the same underlying source, because kill, not being a phrase, has more syntactic freedom (see LLBA V/1, p. 101). In support of this claim, it is shown that these verbs are semantically different. While 'killing' is an action, 'causing' ('to die') is not. This explains why only kill can take time modifiers & purpose phrases, & only cause to die can take victim modifiers. T. Lamb