Prototypical Transitivity

Åshild Næss

| University of Oslo

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027229847 | EUR 115.00 | USD 173.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027292216 | EUR 115.00 | USD 173.00

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.

[Typological Studies in Language, 72] 2007. x, 240 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.72

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Chapter 1: Introduction	1–9
1.1. Why transitivity?	1
1.2. Theoretical preliminaries	3
1.3. Structure of the book	8
Chapter 2: Why a transitive prototype?	11–26
2.1. Introduction	11
2.2. Prototype models	11
2.3. Markedness vs. prototypicality	17
2.4. Conclusion	26
Chapter 3: Defining the transitive prototype: The Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis	27–49
3.1. Introduction	27
3.2. The Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis	27
3.3. Maximal distinction and functional explanations	46
Chapter 4: The Affected Agent	51–84
4.1. Introduction	51
4.2. "Ingestive verbs" and affected agents	52
4.3. Crosslinguistic data	54
4. 4. 'Eat' and markers of agent affectedness	72
4.5. Alternative analyses	77
4.6. Other affected-agent constructions	82
4.7 Concluding remarks	83
Chapter 5: Transitivity in verbs and clauses	85–122
5.1. Introduction	85
5.2. Previous feature-decompositional accounts	86
5.3. Semantic specifications of participant types	89
5.4. Semantic features in verb subcategorisation	107
5.5. Properties of argument NPs	111
5.6. Clause-level properties	114
5.7. Formal correlates	119
5.8. Conclusion	122
Chapter 6: Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion	123–151
6.1. Introduction	123
6.2. Indefinite object deletion	124
6.3. Transitivity and indefinite object deletion	134
6.4. IOD and S/O ambitransitives	145
Chapter 7: Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking	153–184
7.1. Introduction	153
7.2. The discriminatory analysis	154
7.3. The indexing analysis	159
7.4. Case and the maximal semantic distinction of arguments	161
7.5. Case and semantic transitivity: Unifying discrimination and indexing	166
7.6. Semantic extensions	168
7.7. Discriminatory extensions	173
7.8. Split ergativity	175
7.9. A note on case-marking labels	182
Chapter 8: Experiencers and the dative	185–208
8.1. Introduction	185
8.2. The semantic diversity of experience events	185
8.3. Experience clauses and the transitive prototype	189
8.4. The dative case	197
Chapter 9: Beyond prototypical transitivity	209–218
9.1. From Agent and Patient to subject and object	209
9.2. Structural vs. semantic case	211
9.3. Other prototypes	213
9.4. Concluding remarks	217
Appendix: Nonstandard abbreviations in glosses	219
References	221–231
Author index	233–235
Language index	237–238
Subject index	239–240

“A major and highly original contribution to the understanding of an area of morphosyntax which has, through the last decades, come to be known as notoriously complex.”

Leon Stassen, University of Utrecht

“The book contains a large amount of illuminating data with arguments convincing enough to persuade its readers to take an interest in the question as the author originally hoped. It also successfully demonstrates that how linguistic structure is motivated by aspects of human cognition. It is a welcome and worthy addition to the literature on transitivity, one of the most fundamental aspects of linguistic structure.”

Jaehoon Yeon, SOAS, University of London, in Studies in Language Vol. 33:1, 2009

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