How To Express Cause Effect Relationship

This post is about which verbs to use to say 'making something happen' in English.


TO CAUSE [transitive] = to make something happen, especially something bad.

• What is causing deforestation? Deforestation is caused by humans and natural changes on earth.
• China’s air pollution is causing millions of premature deaths and an expat exodus
• Scientists have empirical evidence that increased CO2 is causing an enhanced greenhouse effect.
• The recent rash of Java vulnerabilities is causing me to lose faith in Oracle products.
• The stroke scare caused him to change eating habits

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TO LEAD TO [intransitive and transitive] = to cause something to happen or cause someone to do something

• The release of the book "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was one of the events that led to Civil War in North America
• Involvement of junior employees in decision making process leads to better performance [Applied Psychology].
• Genetically modified corn is leading to insect resistance.
• The ban on hunting is leading to an increase in weak and diseased foxes
• British tourist describes rape attempt that led her to jump out hotel window

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TO RESULT IN something = (phrasal verb) to make something happen

• The accident resulted in the deaths of two passengers.
• Excess eating and sedentary lifestyle may results in plaque to occur and lead to blocked arteries later in the life.
• Comparisons of a number to a boolean, a number to a string, or a string to a boolean are not allowed in XPath 3.0: they result in a type error.

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TO BRING ABOUT = (phrasal verb) to make something happen

• Scientists believe that the discovery of a new energy source, like cold fusion, may bring about a post-scarcity society [Richard Long].

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TO TRIGGER = to make something happen very quickly, especially a series of events:

• A scent, a taste, a film can trigger a memory [How to trigger a memory]
• The same HTML code can trigger different constructs on multiple browsers.
• How to trigger a button click event in JavaScript [StackOverflow]

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TO GIVE RISE TO (formal) to be the reason why something happens [= to originate; produce; cause]

• Semantic ambiguity is one of the linguistic phenomena that may give rise to misunderstanding or failure in communication
• In the Chen ER data model mapping guidelines, nouns appearing in the database requirements tend to give rise to entity type names and the verbs tend to indicate names of relationship types. Attribute names generally arise from additional nouns that describe the nouns corresponding to entity types.


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