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Last update:
9 February 2010

© John Benjamins
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Prototypical Transitivity

Åshild Næss
University of Oslo

Typological Studies in Language 72

2007. x, 240 pp.
Publishing status: Available

Hardbound – In stock
978 90 272 2984 7 / EUR 115.00 / USD 173.00
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978 90 272 9221 6 / EUR 115.00 / USD 173.00
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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.

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

Subject classification

Linguistics
Semantics
Syntax
Theoretical linguistics
Typology