Causative alternation

Causative alternation is about people or things making other people or things do something. When a person or thing causes another person or thing to take an action, we say the first is the "cause" and the second is the "effect."

For example, if a farmer makes his chickens lay eggs, we would say that the farmer caused the chickens to lay eggs. But sometimes we can switch around the words to say the same thing in a different way. So instead of saying that the farmer made the chickens lay eggs, we could say that the eggs were laid by the chickens because of the farmer. This is called "causative alternation."

Basically, it's when we swap around the words in a sentence to show how one thing is affecting something else. And we can do this with lots of different actions - not just making chickens lay eggs!