Causation is generally conceived of as a relation that holds between
events. Apart from a few cursory remarks, the case of stative causation has been
widely neglected. The paper aims at contributing to a more balanced perspective by
arguing for a stative variant of causation, on a par with eventive causation. The
stative variant is analyzed in terms of Moltmann’s ontological notion of tropes.
German causal von-modifiers (‘from’) are taken as a linguistic window into our
understanding of causation. The study of von is particularly suited to this endeavor,
because von-modifiers are confined to expressing the core notion of ‘‘direct causation’’
(Wolff in Cognition 88(1):1–48, 2003). The paper develops a compositional
semantics of causal von-modifiers that derives their eventive and stative readings
from a single lexical entry and allows for coercive adaptions to account for the
observed range of interpretive adjustments. Characteristic features of the interpretation
such as the inferential behavior of causal von-modifiers and the holistic effect
of the stative reading are traced back to independently motivated conceptual
assumptions concerning the spatiotemporal grounding of direct causation. The
formal analysis is couched in terms of Asher’s (Lexical meaning in context. A web
of words. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011) type composition logic

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• Eventive versus stative causation: the case of German causal von-modifiers