Causative Participants

The morphological causative is a highly productive feature of Hungarian. It is formed by adding a suffix directly to the verb stem before any tense or person markers. The causative suffix can also stack with other suffixes, such as the potential suffix, which is placed after the causative (e.g., olvas + tat + hat = olvastathat).

1. Suffix Selection and Vowel Harmony:
The choice between the back-vowel variants (-at / -tat) and front-vowel variants (-et / -tet) depends on vowel harmony. The consonant part depends on the stem:

• -at/-et: Used for stems ending in two consonants (e.g., mond → mondat). This rule takes precedence over the polysyllabic rule to avoid unpronounceable three-consonant clusters (e.g., választ → választat). It is also often used for monosyllabic stems ending in a single consonant, provided that consonant is not t (e.g., ír → írat). However, there are many common exceptions in this category that take -tat/-tet instead (e.g., él → éltet, ül → ültet, lép → léptet).
• -tat/-tet: Used for polysyllabic stems (e.g., olvas → olvastat) and any stem ending in a vowel + t, including monosyllabic ones (e.g., tanít → taníttat, fut → futtat). This 'vowel + t' rule takes precedence over the monosyllabic rule.
• -ik verbs: For regular verbs ending in -ik (including -szik or -zik), only the 3rd-person singular -ik ending is dropped before applying normal suffix rules (e.g., dolgozik → dolgoz- → dolgoztat, játszik → játsz- → játszat). However, a small group of irregular 'v-stem' verbs drop the entire -szik ending (e.g., alszik → altat, eszik → etet, iszik → itat).

2. Participant Marking (The Causative/Factitive):
When you make someone do something, their grammatical role depends on the base verb.

• Intransitive Base: The causee is the direct object.
  Az anya elaltatja a gyereket. (The mother puts the child to sleep.)
• Transitive Base: Hungarian strictly avoids a 'double accusative' (having two nouns marked with the accusative suffix in the same clause). Because the accusative slot is already taken by the object of the action, the causee is marked with -val/-vel. This applies even if the direct object is omitted from the sentence (e.g., Olvastatom vele. - I have him/her read it), because the grammatical slot for the object still exists.
  Kijavíttatom az autót a szerelővel. (I have the mechanic fix the car.)

3. Meaning Nuance:
This pattern covers meanings like 'to force,' 'to ask,' or 'to hire.' Context determines if it is a command or a service being paid for. Note that this suffix is strictly factitive (making, having, or forcing); the permissive meaning ('to let' or 'allow') is expressed differently using verbs like hagy or enged.