Transitivity

The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

This book presents a functional analysis of a notion which has gained considerable importance in cognitive and functional linguistics over the last couple of decades, namely 'prototypical transitivity'. It discusses what prototypical transitivity is, why it should exist, and how it should be defined, as well as how this definition can be employed in the analysis of a number of phenomena of language, such as case-marking, experiencer constructions, and so-called ambitransitives. Also discussed is how a prototype analysis relates to other approaches to transitivity, such as that based on markedness. The basic claim is that transitivity is iconic: a construction with two distinct, independent arguments is prototypically used to refer to an event with two distinct, independent participants. From this principle, a unified account of the properties typically associated with transitivity can be derived, and an explanation for why these properties tend to correlate across languages can be given.

This collection presents typological work on tense, aspect, and epistemic modality in a variety of languages and against the background of different schools of thinking, among which the St. Petersburg Typological School developed and so masterfully implemented by the Petersburg linguist, Vladimir Petrovich Nedjalkov. The volume honors this reputed scholar for his life work. It is in mainly this spirit (and the EUROTYPE spirit) that the following scholars have contributed to the volume: T.Tsunoda on Warrungu (Australian indigeneous language), L. Kulikov on Vedic, K. Kiryu on Japanese, Korean and Newari, N. Sumbatova on Svan (from the Kartvelian group), T.Bulygina & A. Shmelev on Russian, W. Boeder on Georgian, R. Thieroff on aorist and imperfect in European languages, Y. Poupynin on Russian, L. Johanson on Kipchak Turkic, I. Dolinina on Russian, N. Kozintseva on Old and Modern Eastern Armenian, Ch. Lee on Korean, W. Abraham on split ergative languages and German, G. Silnitsky on Russian, V. Plungian on Russian, E. Rakhilina on Russian, and K. Ebert on Kalmyk.

What happens when a canonically transitive form meets a canonically transitive meaning, and what happens when this doesn’t happen? How do dyadic forms relate to monadic ones, and what are the entailments of the operations that the grammar uses to relate one to the other? Collecting original expert work from acquisition, processing, typological and theoretical syntax-semantics research, this volume provides a state of the art as well as cutting edge discussion of central issues in the realm of Transitivity. These include the definition and role of "Natural Transitivity", the interpretation and repercussions of valency changing operations and differential case marking, and the interactions between (in)transitive Gestalts in different categories and at different levels of representation.

This book proposes an overall framework of communication (including translation) that follows CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis)/CL (Critical Linguistics) principles; it devises an analytic tool for the study of transitivity in translation along Hallidayian-functionalist lines; and it incorporates a contrastive corpus of 52 speeches made before the European Parliament in English and Spanish on 9th March 1993 together with their corresponding translations. Both sentence and textual levels become units of analysis. Also, quantitative and qualitative methods are applied. The author analyses the various types of transitivity shifts at sentence level. She also shows that these shifts have contextual effects. Another focus of this study is to present how certain transitivity shifts group together.

The three concepts of case, valency and transitivity belong to the most discussed topics of modern linguistics. On the one hand, they are crucially connected with morphological aspects of the clause, including case marking, person agreement and voice. On the other hand, they are related to several semantic issues such as the meaning of case, semantico-syntactic verbal classes, and the semantic correlates of transitivity. The volume unifies papers written within different theoretical frameworks and representing variegated approaches (Optimality Theory, Government and Binding, various versions of the Functional approach, Cross-linguistic and Typological analyses), containing both numerous new findings in individual languages and valuable observations and generalizations related to case, valency and transitivity.

Τhis book offers a new approach to the theory of change in argument structure and voice morphology. It investigates the diachrony of transitivity, and especially the changes in causative verbs and transitivity alternations, based on data mainly from the Greek and English diachrony (all historical data are transcribed and accompanied by glosses and translations into Modern English). Data from earlier periods provide new information on burning questions in both Historical and Theoretical Linguistics. The study shows that (a) causativisations are the result of reanalysis of intransitive verbs as transitive on the basis of the linguistic cue of Case; (b) the changes in voice morphology do not depend on the derivation and direction of new transitivity alternations. Finally, the study demonstrates that the generalisation that guides the changes in voice demands morphological differentiation of the anticausative from the passive types.