Causation

Now we come to the more complex events. These verbs encode the broad idea of causation, and have three case slots; not only the THEME and LOC of Simple events, but a AGENT (or CAUSER) slot.
Delancey has the general AGENT slot, witha single CAUSE meaning. As discussed by Delancey, AGENT in this meaning is anything that can be construed as causing an action. In [1], Delancey presents examples of "His attitude infuriates me" (AGENT = "His attitude"), "This mess really bothers him." (AGE = "This mess"), "The beauty of this vista has inspired many artists." (AGENT = "The beauty ..."), and "The look on her face would curdle milk." (AGENT = "The look ...").
Janckendoff [2], cited in a previous post, recognizes two kingd of grammatical causation, CAUSE and LET, with the AGENT for CAUSE "bringing the event about", and for LET, "ceasing to prevent the event".
As noted in a previous post, Steven Pinker, in The Stuff of Thought, recognizes what seems to be this basic distinction between CAUSE and LET.
Jackendoff's "ceasing to prevent the event" for let appears to be not quite right; it is included in, but not completely covering, the range of LET. THe basic difference between CAUSE and LET seems ot be that with CAUSE, the CAUSE'd event is construed as not happening on its own, and would not have happend but for the (unspecified) action of the AGENT. LET, in the other hand, deals with an event that is construed as happening, on their own, but with the (unspecified) action of the AGENT somehow implicated in its happening. This can be either by removing a condition that prevents them from happening, or by doing something that establishes a condition that allows it to happen.
Jackendoff's brief definition of LET shows there is another type of causation - PREVENT, whic is a sort of opposite of LET. Prevent, like LET, deals with events that are construed as (potentially) happening on their own, but through the action of the AGENT is construed as not happening.
PREVENT may be able to be treated something along the lines of AGENT CAUSE NOT simple-event, and it may at some points be useful to view it in this manner. But it seems that a certain clarity is obtained by keeping it separately.
So we not have three tyoes of complex events

• AGENT CAUSE simple-event
• AGENT LET simple-event
• AGENT PREVENT simple-event

where simple-event is any of the four types of event discussed in the previous post.
[1] Delancey, Scott, Event Construal and Case Role Assignment, in Proc. of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1991), pp. 338-353

[2] Jackendoff, Ray, A System fo Semantic Primitives (pdf), in Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing, 10-13 June 1975