Prototypical Transitivity

Abstract

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.

Semantic roles and verbless constructions

“…We believe that semantic roles should be defined as relatively coarse-grained feature bundles tied to event types -semantic units that correspond to the kind of information that arguments of verbless constructions are able to provide -and that they exist independently of verbs (cf. Croft 1991;DeLancey 1991;Goldberg 1995Goldberg , 2006Naess 2003Naess , 2007 whose proposals share features with ours). We may say that, in verbless constructions, it is the semantic layer of participant roles that is not explicated.…”

“…He sees them as prototype categories that consist of recurring clusters of lexical entailments imposed by groups of verbs on their arguments. Furthermore, Naess (2003Naess ( , 2007 introduces bundles of features that resemble those in the work of Rozwadowska (1988Rozwadowska ( , 1989 but do not directly correspond to semantic roles seen as subcategorized by verbs. Instead, she intends that terms like agent and patient indicate "labels for clusters of properties exhibited by noun phrases (or, strictly speaking, by their referents) when these function as core arguments of specific clauses" (Naess 2003(Naess : 106, 2007.…”

“…DeLancey (1991), for his part, presents a localist theory of event structure for characterizing semantic roles. Naess (2003Naess ( , 2007 also defines semantic roles as participants in events, even though no direct reference to verbs is made. In other words, the events coded constitute the starting point when semantic roles are examined, and as they are coded by verbs, verbs are central in most definitions, although it is important to state clearly that not all scholars use verbs explicitly for this purpose.…”

Variation in pronominal indexing

“…On affectedness as a criterion for high transitivity, see Hopper & Thompson (1980), Tsunoda (1981Tsunoda ( , 1985. On affectedness as a parameter of semantic distinctness between the two participants of a transitive clause, see Naess (2004Naess ( , 2006Naess ( , 2007.…”

“…Teiwa (Klamer 2010a Verbs as in (7) are intransitives with a prefix indexing the S. They are not experiencer-object verbs (Pawley et al 2000;Evans 2004), i.e. transitive verbs in which the experiencer is encoded as the object and the stimulus, whose person, number and gender is fixed, is encoded as the subject (Evans 2004: 169).…”