Prototypical Transitivity (Typological Studies in Language)

Prototypical Transitivity

Typological Studies in Language (TSL) A companion series to the journal Studies in Language. Volumes in this series are functionally and typologically oriented, covering specific topics in language by collecting together data from a wide variety of languages and language typologies.

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Prototypical Transitivity

Åshild Næss University of Oslo

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Næss, Åshild. Prototypical transitivity / Åshild Næss. p. cm. (Typological Studies in Language, issn 0167-7373 ; v. 72) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Grammar, Comparative and general--Transitivity. 2. Protoype (Linguistics) 3. Semantics. I. Title. P281.N34    2007 415'.6--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 2984 7 (Hb; alk. paper)

2007018295

© 2007 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

Preface chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Why transitivity?  1 1.2 Theoretical preliminaries  3 1.2.1 Functional typology and prototype theory  3 1.2.2 Definitions and terminology  6 1.3 Structure of the book  8 chapter 2 Why a transitive prototype? 2.1 Introduction  11 2.2 Prototype models  11 2.2.1 Characteristics of a prototype model  11 2.2.2 Transitivity as a prototype concept  12 2.2.3 Descriptive and explanatory issues  16 2.3 Markedness vs. prototypicality  17 2.3.1 Comrie’s generalisation  17 2.3.2 Transitives vs. intransitives  20 2.3.3 Transitivity and the maximal distinction of categories  22 2.3.4 The markedness of prototypically transitive clauses  24 2.4 Conclusion  26 chapter 3 Defining the transitive prototype: The Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis 3.1 Introduction  27 3.2 The maximally distinguished arguments hypothesis  27 3.2.1 Transitivity and the distinguishability of participants  27 3.2.2 Inherent vs. relational properties  30 3.2.3 The trouble with agents  32 3.2.4 Participant roles vs. thematic relations  35

ix

1

11

27



Prototypical Transitivity

3.2.5 The properties of agents and patients  37 3.2.6 Agent and patient as maximally distinct categories  44 3.3 Maximal distinction and functional explanations  46

chapter 4 The Affected Agent 4.1 Introduction  51 4.2 “Ingestive verbs” and affected agents  52 4.3 Crosslinguistic data  54 4.3.1 Indefinite object deletion and suppletive verb pairs  54 4.3.2 Labile verbs  57 4.3.3 Cross-referencing properties  61 4.3.4 Causativisation  63 4.3.5 Case-marking properties  68 4.4 ‘Eat’ and markers of agent affectedness  72 4.4.1 Affected Agents and the meaning of ‘eat’  72 4.4.2 ‘Eat’ and reflexive constructions  72 4.4.3 ‘Eat’ grammaticalised as marker of agent affectedness  75 4.5 Alternative analyses  77 4.6 Other affected-agent constructions  82 4.7 Concluding remarks  83 chapter 5 Transitivity in verbs and clauses 5.1 Introduction  85 5.2 Previous feature-decompositional accounts  86 5.3 Semantic specifications of participant types  89 5.3.1 [+VOL, –INST, +AFF]: Volitional Undergoers  89 5.3.2 [–VOL, +INST, –AFF]: Force  93 5.3.3 [–VOL, +INST, +AFF]: Instrument  96 5.3.4 [+VOL, –INST, –AFF]: Frustrative  99 5.3.5 [–VOL, –INST, –AFF]: Neutral  102 5.4 Semantic features in verb subcategorisation  107 5.5 Properties of argument NPs  111 5.6 Clause-level properties  114 5.6.1 Clausal operators as “feature-switchers”  114 5.6.2 Negation and mood  114 5.6.3 Aspect  118 5.7 Formal correlates  119 5.8 Conclusion  122

51

85



Table of contents 

chapter 6 Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion 6.1 Introduction  123 6.2 Indefinite object deletion  124 6.2.1 Defining the term  124 6.2.2 Typical IOD verbs  126 6.2.3 Clausal-level IOD  128 6.2.4 Previous approaches  129 6.3 Transitivity and indefinite object deletion  134 6.3.1 IOD as a detransitivising mechanism  134 6.3.2 Additional factors  139 6.3.3 Semantic specialisation: The case of ‘eat’ and ‘drink’  141 6.4 IOD and S/O ambitransitives  145 chapter 7 Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 7.1 Introduction  153 7.2 The discriminatory analysis  154 The indexing analysis  159 7.3 7.4 Case and the maximal semantic distinction of arguments  161 7.4.1 Patient/object marking  161 7.4.2 Agent/subject marking  164 Case and semantic transitivity – unifying discrimination and 7.5 indexing  166 Semantic extensions  168 7.6 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 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 8.4.1 Dative as a marker of Volitional Undergoers  197 8.4.2 From recipients to possessors  199 8.4.3 Causee case-marking  200 8.4.4 The relevance of animacy  203 8.4.5 Less affected objects  205 8.4.6 Uncontrolled intransitives  206

123

153

185

 Prototypical Transitivity

chapter 9 Beyond prototypical transitivity 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

209

Appendix. Nonstandard abbreviations in glosses

219

References

221

Author index

233

Language index

237

Subject index

239

Preface

This book is a considerably revised version of my 2004 doctoral dissertation from the university of Nijmegen, entitled Transitivity: from semantics to structure. Everything stated in the acknowledgements of that dissertation still holds, though I would like to repeat here my thanks to my thesis supervisor, Leon Stassen, and to Even Hovdhaugen, whose guidance and support over many years has meant a great deal for my academic development. I would also like to thank the two anonymous Benjamins referees whose insightful criticisms convinced me that the book would benefit from a fair amount of rewriting, re-organisation, and shortening. This labour was made possible by a grant from the Institute for Comparative Research on Human Culture in Oslo. I would also like to thank the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Oslo, who provided me with office space when I was officially on leave from my regular duties to work on this book.

chapter 1

Introduction “In many languages (and perhaps covertly in all languages) the transitivity relationship lies at the explanatory core of most grammatical processes.” (Hopper and Thompson 1982a)

1.1 Why transitivity? This book explores 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 exists (or rather, why linguistic theory assumes it exists), 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. Much has been written about the grammatical phenomenon of transitivity, for several reasons. The most obvious reason is that it is a central phenomenon in the structure of human languages, and that it appears to be universal. It is also, however, rather less well understood than the large amount of literature on the subject might suggest. Linguistics as a science, though a discipline with a centuries-old tradition, has seen a number of fundamental and very important changes in focus and method over the last hundred years or so. Modern linguists seek to understand not just how languages work, but why they should work in this particular way rather than some other. The question of where this explanation should be sought is answered in different ways within different theoretical paradigms – the most basic and famous distinction being that between those assuming an autonomous “language module” in the human brain which sets out the basic parameters defining possible linguistic structure on the one hand, and those who believe that language should be considered a function of more general human cognitive abilities and the everyday functions a language is required to serve on the other. But the very fact that an explanation is being sought reveals the central underlying assumption that there is something to be explained – in other words, that there is a fundamental unity to



Prototypical Transitivity

the phenomenon we call “language” which allows us to abstract away from individual languages and postulate properties and principles shared by them all. This notion of universal principles of grammar is nothing new, but it has been greatly developed and refined over the last few decades. One of the most important factors which has influenced our notion of the kinds of properties that might be language-universal is simply the availability of a much greater range of data than that which was available to pre-20th century grammarians. Traditional grammatical terminology and analysis has been, and is still being, continually challenged by the discovery of grammatical phenomena which do not seem to fit neatly into the categories inherited from Greek and Latin grammar. As a result, the use of traditional terminology has come to be approached with much greater care and greater demands for precision and clarification. Thus one might still, for example, want to label a grammatical category in an Australian language a “dative” or a “passive”; but the linguist is then expected to clarify why this term is chosen, exactly what kind of phenomenon it is being used to describe, and perhaps how this use of the term differs from that of classical grammar. For purposes of crosslinguistic comparison, one would seek to agree on a basic definition of a term, and then examine to what extent categories in individual languages resemble or differ from this crosslinguistic “prototype” (see below). Such negotiation of the meanings of grammatical terms is of course a continuous, ongoing process, and some categories are harder to pin down than others. It is therefore hardly surprising that there are still a number of terms floating around in linguistic theory which seem to have been adopted rather directly from classical grammar, with little agreement on, or even explicit discussion of, their precise definition. The reason for this is obvious: these are tried-and-tested terms which through years and years of linguistic work have proven useful, if not indispensable, in linguistic analysis, and discarding them because they are poorly defined would lead to much greater difficulties for our understanding of human language than continuing to use them while keeping the rough-and-ready definition that has proved perfectly workable over the years. One such term is transitivity, which plays a central role in almost any linguistic theory, and is generally assumed to describe a language-universal phenomenon; but it is nevertheless often used in a way which takes its content for granted, without any attempt at a precise definition. A number of definitions have been suggested and generally converge on essentially the same semantic properties ( see e.g Lakoff 1977, Hopper and Thompson 1980, Givón 2001a, Lazard 2003); but the term is often used for particular syntactic constructions without clarifying how they relate to the semantic definition, or indeed to other types of construction in a language (see chapter 2), and there is no universally accepted definition which captures precisely the range of functions the term is being used to cover. Furthermore,



Chapter 1.  Introduction

listing a set of properties as characteristic of a particular construction still leaves open the question of “what transitivity is” in the sense of why this particular set of properties correlate and are associated with this particular kind of structure. The latter question is a central focus of this book. The precise formulation of a semantic transitive prototype, in terms of a list of properties taken to be characteristic of transitive clauses, is an important descriptive tool, but ultimately it is only a higher-order fact about language, a cluster of correlating properties given the label “transitivity”. But in order to understand what kind of phenomenon this label really represents, it is necessary to explain both why such a transitive prototype is apparently language-universal, and why it should have the particular form that the definition in question predicts. For this reason, a main goal of this book is to discuss how principles of functional and cognitive linguistics can be brought to bear in an attempt at understanding the phenomenon of transitivity from a crosslinguistic perspective. By grounding the definition of the transitive prototype not just in observed crosslinguistic patterns but also in principles of category structure and iconic motivation, my admittedly ambitious goal is to provide an analysis which can contribute to a genuine understanding, rather than simply a sophisticated description, of the phenomenon of transitivity.

1.2 Theoretical preliminaries 1.2.1 Functional typology and prototype theory This book approaches the phenomenon of transitivity from the point of view of functional typology. The immediate methodological implications of a functionaltypological approach are twofold: Firstly, language must be understood on the basis of its function as a human communicative device, used by real people in particular settings and constrained by limitations of human physiology and cognitive processes. In other words, an explanation of a linguistic phenomenon should, from a functional-typological perspective, be grounded in the function of this particular phenomenon in linguistic communication, in the way in which human beings perceive, categorise, and reason about their world, or the way in which linguistic information is processed in the human brain. Secondly, in order to learn anything about language in general, it is necessary to examine as many languages as possible. To cite Croft (1990 :246–247): “The functional-typological approach uses an empiricist method to answer the question of ‘what is a possible human language’ by determining what is an attested human language”. In order to be able to explain why languages do certain things and not





Prototypical Transitivity

others, it is first necessary to get as accurate an idea as possible of what it actually is languages do – and don’t do. Functional typology seeks to explain linguistic generalisations in terms of motivation rather than absolute causal relations. One cannot predict from a given functional principle what linguistic structure will be like; but a given structure once present must be assumed to be motivated to at least some extent by functional factors. A key concept is that of competing motivations: different functional principles may pull in different directions with respect to a certain structural domain, and what the outcome will be is not predictable for any individual language; indeed, such competing motivations are a major source of linguistic variation (cf. e.g. Haiman 1983, DuBois 1985). The main functional principles assumed to enter into this type of competition are iconicity and economy (though see chapter 2 and Givón 1985b for an argument that iconicity itself is ultimately motivated by cognitive economy). Iconicity refers to the idea that language structure in some way reflects the structure of human experience, a principle which can be instantiated in a number of different ways (for a good overview see Cristofaro 2003 :8–9 and references therein). By contrast, economy is the tendency towards simplification of linguistic structure, to minimise the effort involved in language production and processing. The competition between the two arises from the fact that iconicity dictates overt linguistic expression of every part of a message, while economy requires linguistic expression to be as simple as possible. A main objective of this book is to seek functional explanations for observed crosslinguistic patterns, according to the principles of functional typology. In arriving at these explanations, however, my analysis also builds on the principles and methods of a theoretical approach which in some ways is closely related to that of functional typology, namely cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguistics has traditionally been much concerned with the ways in which linguistic categorisation reflects human categorisation (see e.g. Lakoff 1987, Taylor 1995). In other words, it takes a functional approach towards linguistic explanation, in that it seeks to explain facts of language structure in terms of general principles of human cognition. A central explanatory tool in cognitive linguistics is so-called prototype theory, as laid out in works such as Rosch (1978), Lakoff (1987), and Taylor (1995). Prototype theory is a model of categorisation which takes categories to be definable in terms of similarity to a central exemplar, as opposed to the classic, “Aristotelian” view of category membership as being determined by necessary and sufficient properties. In the latter view, an entity is either a member or a non-member of a category, depending on whether or not it shows the necessary and sufficient properties of that category; there are no intermediate options. Prototype categories, on the other hand, allow for degrees of membership; an entity can be consid-



Chapter 1.  Introduction

ered a more or less good member of a category depending on its degree of similarity to the category prototype. In this book, the principles of prototype theory will be employed not just to help define the category “transitivity”, but also to help explain why it shows the particular properties which are generally ascribed to it. The assumption that the concept of transitivity is analysable as a prototype category (see chapter 2 for a discussion of why this should be so) carries with it certain implications not just regarding the structure of this category itself, but also its relationship to other grammatical categories. These implications, following from the principles of prototype theory, not only constitute a basic framework for the formulation of a crosslinguistically applicable transitive prototype; they also, as it turns out, point to a basic functional principle which may serve as an explanation for why this particular semantic prototype is expressed by that particular type of formal structure, the transitive clause. Transitivity, it will be argued here, is iconic: the basic function of a structure with two independent arguments is to refer to an event which is construed as involving two clearly distinct and independent participants. This book, then, is not a typological study in the classical sense of the word: I will not be setting up a sample of languages from which I will compare “transitive clauses” for the purpose of dividing the constructions discovered into types and attempting to formulate generalisations over these types (for such a study see Kittilä 2002a). Its purpose is rather to formulate a crosslinguistic generalisation, stated in functional terms, and to argue for the validity of this generalisation by testing its predictions on a wide range of crosslinguistic data, and by demonstrating how it can provide solutions to a number of problems of typological linguistic analysis. I take as my starting-point the common assumption in typological linguistics that the grammatical phenomenon of transitivity can be described, from a crosslinguistic perspective, in terms of a semantic prototype; that is, a cluster of semantic properties which characterise the construction known as a transitive clause across languages. I then discuss how this prototype should be defined, on the basis of principles of prototype theory, and of the notion of distinguishability of participants identified by Kemmer (1993) as being essential to the semantic concept of transitivity. Once a definition has been arrived at, I will then argue for the descriptive and explanatory adequacy of this definition using the methods of functional typology: examination of relevant data from a wide range of genetically and geographically diverse languages, and the use of functional principles to explain why this particular set of semantic and pragmatic properties should be seen to correlate with a particular formal structure crosslinguistically.





Prototypical Transitivity

1.2.2 Definitions and terminology The term ‘transitivity’ is used both for a syntactic construction, and for a semantic relation taken to be characteristic of this construction. This terminological duality is a natural consequence of the nature of crosslinguistically applicable theories of language. It arises from the fundamental problem of crosslinguistic comparison, namely that of deciding what to compare. Linguistic forms within a single language can in principle be classified on the basis of their purely formal differences; but linguistic forms by their very nature are different from language to language, and comparing entities that are formally similar across unrelated languages is unlikely to yield any useful results. Rather, the task of linguistic theory is to determine which functions linguistic forms are used to serve, and to what extent these functions are the same across languages. The task of crosslinguistic comparison, therefore, becomes that of identifying the forms in different languages which fill the same or comparable functions. The assumption behind the formulation of a crosslinguistically valid “semantic transitive prototype” is that all languages, or at least a significant number of languages, have a formal construction – the transitive clause – whose core function is to express the meaning specified by the prototype. It also, however, makes certain assumptions about the type of structure which will be used to express this particular meaning in a language. Exactly what characterises a transitive clause, structurally speaking, will obviously vary from language to language, for the reasons outlined above. But it is expected, at the very least, to contrast in certain fundamental ways with another basic clause type of the language in question, the intransitive clause. In this book, a transitive clause will be taken to mean a construction with two syntactically privileged arguments. How a syntactically privileged argument is to be defined is obviously subject to language-specific criteria; phenomena such as agreement, case-marking, susceptibility to syntactic processes such as passivisation or antipassivisation, may be among the kinds of criteria employed to identify a transitive clause in a given language. Nevertheless, the basic distinction between two-argument and single-argument constructions is assumed to be languageuniversal. According to Dixon (1979 :102), “all human languages classify actions into two basic types: those involving one obligatory participant, which are described by intransitive sentences, and those involving two obligatory participants, which are dealt with by transitive sentences”. The assumption that there is a universal semantic prototype of transitivity then amounts to the assumption that twoargument constructions are in all languages used at least to refer to situations which conform to this semantic prototype.



Chapter 1.  Introduction

Dixon’s formulation, referring to “obligatory participants”, can be read as a semantic definition of the phenomenon of transitivity; a transitive clause refers to an event which involves two obligatory participants. The formulation “obligatory participant” is not unproblematic, however, as many languages have constructions overtly encoding two participants but nevertheless showing formal properties more characteristic of intransitive clauses (for example, the English sentence John looked at Mary is structurally more like the presumably intransitive John works at the bank than the transitive John hit Mary). Many languages also have structural alternations which allow for the use of structurally intransitive constructions to refer to events clearly involving two participants, such as passives, antipassives or object-incorporation constructions, among others. The formulation “syntactically privileged argument” is meant to capture this distinction, as a construction patterning formally like an intransitive must be assumed to have a single syntactically privileged argument, even if overt reference is made to a second participant. It is therefore essential to distinguish between transitive clauses as involving two syntactically privileged arguments, and two-participant clauses which covers any kind of clause which makes overt reference to two participants in the event described. To refer to the participants encoded in one- and two-participant clauses, I will use the well-established terms S, A, and O: S referring to the single participant of an intransitive clause, A referring to the most “agent-like” participant of a twoparticipant clause, and O referring to the second, non-agentive participant of a two-participant clause. Note that this use of the terms differs slightly from that of Dixon (1979, 1994), where A and O are specifically defined as the roles found in formally transitive constructions, whereas “extended intransitives”, that is, formally intransitive constructions which involve a second participant expressed in some other way than as a syntactic direct object, are taken to involve an S plus a second participant “marked in some other way” (Dixon 1994 :123). In this book, the terms S, A and O will be used to refer to participants rather than syntactic arguments; that is, to entities entering into certain types of semantically definable relations in an event, regardless of how these entities are expressed formally. This is the way the terms are used in the best-known paper on prototypical transitivity, Hopper and Thompson (1980), where A and O are used “to refer to the two participants in a two-participant clause. We make no claims about the grammatical relations that the NP arguments referring to these participants might bear to the verb” (Hopper and Thompson 1980 :252, fn. 1). The reason for this choice is that in discussing prototypical transitivity, it is useful to be able to generalise over alternating formal constructions encoding the same participants in different formal structures. Because different languages have different criteria for the inclusion of nonprototypical instances in the formally transitive category, languages may show different formal encodings of the same semantic relation; an





Prototypical Transitivity

example is the indefinite O participants discussed in chapter 2, which some languages encode as syntactic direct objects in a formally transitive construction, while others encode them as oblique participants in an extended intransitive construction. In order to be able to discuss this differential treatment of the same in principle obligatory participant in a general and language-independent way, it is useful to have a single term to refer to a participant regardless of how it is formally encoded, in a formally transitive clause or in some other type of construction. For this reason, S, A and O here refer to participants of one- and two-participant events respectively, regardless of their structural encoding; the second participant of a two-participant clause will be referred to as an O whether it is encoded as a syntactic direct object or as an oblique argument of an extended intransitive construction. In general, the names of languages and their genetic classifications follow those found in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS; Haspelmath et al. 2005) where nothing else is indicated. Language examples have as far as possible been reproduced in the form in which they appear in the source, although grammatical glosses have to a certain extent been standardised, in order to avoid multiple glosses of the same grammatical category. The standardised glosses conform to the Leipzig Glossing Rules, which can be found on the Web at http://www. eva.mpg.de/lingua/files/morpheme.html. Nonstandard abbreviations are listed in the Appendix.

1.3 Structure of the book The rest of this book is organised as follows: Chapter 2 asks the question of why a prototype definition is a good way of approaching the phenomenon of transitivity, and outlines the challenges which any attempt at formulating such a prototype definition must confront. Furthermore, it contrasts the prototype analysis of transitivity with another influential approach, based on the notion of naturalness or markedness, and shows how their fundamentally different theoretical startingpoints ultimately lead to some striking differences in how the term ‘transitivity’ is used. Chapter 3 proposes that the notion of distinctness of participants is at the basis of the transitive-intransitive distinction, and that the transitive prototype must be defined in terms of the presence of two participants which are clearly distinct not just physically, but in the sense that they play maximally distinct roles in the event in question. It then argues that this conception of the transitive proto1. Note that exactly what it means for a participant to be “obligatory” is in itself a problematic issue; see e.g. the discussion of indefinite object deletion in chapter 6.



Chapter 1.  Introduction

type provides a functional explanation both for the existence of a transitive prototype and for the fact that this prototype is seen to involve certain specific semantic properties rather than others. Chapter 4 examines a particular empirical prediction which follows from the proposed definition of the transitive prototype, namely that verbs with an affected agent argument should tend to occur in constructions other than a canonical transitive clause, and shows that this is in fact the case for a wide range of languages. Chapter 5 deals with further predicted deviations from prototypical transitivity, showing that all possible deviations from the prototypical instance of maximal semantic distinction may lead to the use of a construction other than the canonical transitive clause in some language. Furthermore, it shows how all the properties typically taken to be relevant for transitivity can be understood as ultimately influencing the distinctness of participants. Chapter 6 discusses so-called ambitransitives, arguing that the phenomenon known as indefinite object deletion is best analysed as a syntactic detransitivisation mechanism, typically employed when an object has a low degree of distinctness. Chapter 7 shows how the notion of transitivity as defined by maximal semantic distinction of arguments can be exploited in the analysis of core case-marking, and argues for an approach to casemarking which integrates the two best-known functional models, the discriminatory and indexing approaches, into a single unified model. Chapter 8 discusses clauses of experience and argues that the wide range of variation found in the encoding of such clauses, both crosslinguistically and within individual languages, must be understood as a result of the difficulty of categorising such clauses in terms of the semantic opposition between a controlling agent and an affected patient. It also proposes a semantic analysis of the case category often associated with experiencers, the dative case. Finally, Chapter 9 looks at some of the implications of the conclusions drawn in the rest of the book for other areas of grammar and linguistic analysis.



chapter 2

Why a transitive prototype?

2.1 Introduction The notion of a “transitive prototype” is fairly well entrenched in functional-typological linguistics, and is frequently appealed to in language description and analysis, although the theoretical questions which follow from such a notion have to a large extent been left unanswered. One of the main purposes of this book is to refine the prototype as an analytical tool, that is, provide a definition of the prototype that can give a principled account of a larger set of empirical data than has been covered by previous accounts. However, just as important are the underlying theoretical issues, such as why there should be a prototype in the first place, and why it should take a certain form. This chapter will address the question of why a prototype model is a useful way of conceptualising the grammatical notion “transitivity”, what the theoretical and empirical implications of such a prototype model are, and how it relates to other approaches to the notion of transitivity.

2.2 Prototype models 2.2.1 Characteristics of a prototype model The basic characteristic of a prototype definition is that it assigns membership of a category by means of a judgement of similarity to a central exemplar, the prototype. A prototype incorporates all the properties thought to be characteristic of the category in question, and entities may be judged as good or less good members of the category on the basis of their degree of similarity to the prototype, that is, how many of these characteristic properties they exhibit. An essential property of a prototype category is therefore that it is gradable; entities may be more or less similar to the prototype and therefore be considered to belong to the category to a greater or lesser extent. Furthermore, the properties which characterise a prototype are typically those which define a category in clear contrast to other categories in the same domain. According to Rosch (1978 :37), “the more prototypical of a category a member is



Prototypical Transitivity

rated, the more attributes it has in common with other members of the category and the fewer attributes in common with members of the contrasting categories”. That is, a prototypical member of a category not only maximally resembles other members of that category, but is also maximally distinct from members of other, contrasting categories: it will have all and only the defining properties of the category in question, and few or none of the defining properties of other categories. Rosch suggests that this is a basic principle of human categorisation: “for natural language categories... the extent to which items have attributes common to the category was highly negatively correlated with the extent to which they have attributes belonging to members of contrast categories... It may be that such structure is given by the correlated clusters of attributes of the real world. Or such structure may be a result of the human tendency once a contrast exists to define attributes for contrasting categories so that the categories will be maximally distinctive” (Rosch 1978 :37, my emphasis).

That is, in human categorisation, including linguistic categorisation, contrasting categories within a domain tend to be defined in terms of features that are maximally opposed. This means that being a prototypical member of a category not only entails having all the properties characteristic of that category and shared by its members; it also crucially entails not having the defining properties of the contrasting categories in the same domain. This principle is explainable through the notion of cognitive economy: the whole purpose of categorisation is to make efficient generalisations across a large number of entities perceived to share certain crucial similarities, thus “[t]o categorize a stimulus means to consider it, for purposes of that categorization, not only equivalent to other stimuli in the same category but also different from stimuli not in that category” (Rosch 1978 :28). This notion of the maximal contrast of categories will be central to the discussion of the prototype definition of transitivity in this and the following chapter. 2.2.2 Transitivity as a prototype concept It has been recognised for quite some time that the concept of “transitivity” behaves like a prototype category; that is, both from a crosslinguistic perspective and in many individual languages, the category “transitive clause” admits of degrees of membership. The traditional notion of a “transitive verb” referred to a simple dichotomy: a transitive verb was a verb which required two argument NPs to form a grammatical clause, whereas an intransitive clause required only one. However, there are many languages where this basic distinction does not adequately cover the range of possibilities. For instance, there are languages where different two-participant



Chapter 2.  Why a transitive prototype?

verbs require different case-markers on their O arguments (2.1); languages where some verbs require “objects” marked by prepositions, while other verbs take simple noun objects (2.2); or languages where some verbs occur with an overtly expressed O participant, but do not cross-reference this participant directly on the verb, while other verbs do cross-reference a second participant (2.3). (2.1) German (Indo-European, Germanic; Kittilä 2002a :51): a. Er schläg-t den junge-n he.nom hit.prs-3sg acc boy-acc ‘He hits the boy.’ b. Er hilf-t der frau he.nom help.prs-3sg dat woman ‘He helps the woman.’ c. Er flieg-t (nach München) he.nom fly.prs-3sg prep Munich ‘He is flying (to Munich).’ (2.2) English: a. He hits the boy. b. He thinks of the boy. c. He sleeps. (2.3) Äiwoo (Reefs-Santa Cruz): a. I-togulo-gu-i-le pfv-hit-3minA-3augO-ua ‘He hit the two of them.’ b. Ø-i-tato ngâgo-i-le 3minS-pfv-be.angry to-3aug-ua ‘He got angry with the two of them.’

1. The genetic affiliation of the Äiwoo language is unresolved. Lincoln (1978) argues that it should be assumed to be Austronesian, while Wurm (1978) claims that it is the result of an “incomplete takeover” of an Austronesian language by a Papuan-speaking population. Wurm (1982) classifies the language as belonging to the “East Papuan” family, but the existence of this family is disputed, and it is not recognised by Haspelmath et al. (2005), who simply group Äiwoo with the languages of nearby Santa Cruz island under “Reefs-Santa Cruz”. It is hoped that ongoing research will resolve this question; in the meantime, I follow the WALS classification. Both in the Ethnologue base and in WALS, the name of the language is written ‘Ayiwo’. This spelling is both phonemically inaccurate and based on a system of orthography whose use is declining in the language community. The spelling ‘Äiwoo’ is based on fieldwork and discussions with speakers. All Äiwoo data are from the author’s own field notes.





Prototypical Transitivity

c. Ø-i-wä (ngä nuumä) 3minS-pfv-go to village ‘He went (to the village).’

The German verb schlagen ‘hit’ takes an accusative-marked O, hilfen ‘help’ takes a dative-marked O (cf. chapter 8), while fliegen ‘fly’ does not require an O argument; English hit similarily takes a ‘direct’, bare-NP object, look takes a prepositional object, and sleep takes no object. Äiwoo cross-references the O participant of togulo ‘hit’ on the verb, while the O of tato ‘be angry with’, expressed in an oblique phrase, is not cross-referenced; wä ‘go’, on the other hand, has no O at all (for more on argument cross-referencing in Äiwoo see 2.3.2). Such data suggest that “transitivity” may be a matter of degree; the (b) examples in (2.1–3) appear to be “more transitive” than the clauses without any O NP, but “less transitive” than those which treat this O NP as a privileged syntactic argument. In other words, membership of the category “transitive verb” or “transitive clause” is gradable depending on an item’s degree of similarity to a central exemplar – a prototype structure. Furthermore, if one examines the semantic correlates of these formal alternations across languages, an interesting pattern emerges. It appears that roughly the same semantic properties are relevant for the encoding of a clause as more or less transitive in all languages, or at least in a significant majority; though the exact set of semantic criteria which must be satisfied for a clause to be formally encoded as “fully transitive” varies between languages. This, too, represents a prototype perspective: crosslinguistically, one can define the transitive prototype as a set of semantic properties taken to represent the core meaning of a certain type of structure – the “transitive clause” – in all languages. The extent to which the use of this structure is extended to cases where some but not all of these defining properties are present, however, varies from language to language; in other words, there is variation in how similar to the prototype an item must be judged to be in order to be assigned membership in the category “transitive clause”. Thus, for example, verbs like ‘kill’ or ‘cut’ are expected to be treated as transitive across languages – indeed, verbs like these are frequently the basis for determining what should count as the basic transitive clause of a language. The verb ‘see’, on the other hand, is formally transitive in English but not in a number of other languages; in Samoan, for instance, the verb va’ai ‘see’ takes an oblique rather than an absolutive object and so is treated differently from verbs like ‘kill’ or ‘cut’. Then again, a verb like ‘sit’ is intransitive in English and most other languages, though some languages allow it to be used in what is formally a transitive sentence with the thing sat on as an object, e.g. Khmu’ (Austro-Asiatic, Mon-Khmer) kәә tèn rntèn ‘he sit chair’ (Svantesson 1983 cited in Kittilä 2002a :48).



Chapter 2.  Why a transitive prototype?

The best-known formulation of these observations is that of Hopper and Thompson (1980). They list what they call the “component parts of the Transitivity notion”, representing a scale according to which clauses can be ranked as more or less “Transitive”; each property on the list can have either a “high” or a “low” value, and the more “high” values a clause shows, the higher it is in Transitivity: (2.4) Transitivity features, Hopper and Thompson (1980):

high

low

A. Participants B. Kinesis C. Aspect D. Punctuality E. Volitionality F. Affirmation G. Mode H. Agency I. Affectedness of O J. Individuation of O

2 or more participants, A and O action telic punctual volitional affirmative realis A high in potency O totally affected O highly individuated

1 participant non-action atelic non-punctual non-volitional negative irrealis A low in potency O not affected O non-individuated

The individual properties on this list will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5. The main point to note here is that this set of features are meant to characterise clauses as more or less transitive, and that a “high” value for all the features is taken to represent “cardinal” Transitivity – in other words, the prototype. There have been many attempts in linguistic literature at providing a precise formulation of the transitive prototype (see e.g. Lakoff 1977, Givón 1985a, Kittilä 2002a, Lazard 2003). They vary to a certain extent in detail, but there is general agreement on the essential features of the prototype: A prototypical transitive clause is taken to be one which describes an event involving: – a volitionally acting “agent” participant – performing a concrete, dynamic action – which has a perceptible and lasting effect on a specific “patient”. In addition, the event should be presented as real and concluded; that is, the clause should show perfective rather than imperfective aspect, realis rather than irrealis mood, be positive rather than negated, etc. These properties, or whatever subset of them applies to the grammar of a given language, are found to define the core use of a particular clause type of most if not all languages: the transitive clause. 2. Hopper and Thompson use the term “Transitivity” with a capital T to distinguish their prototype concept from the general, pretheoretical notion “transitivity”.





Prototypical Transitivity

2.2.3 Descriptive and explanatory issues The existence of a transitive prototype is a remarkable fact about human language, and has proved an extremely useful analytical tool; a wide range of linguistic phenomena which were previously thought to be unrelated have received explanations in terms of the complex and gradable notion of transitivity. There are, however, a number of challenges inherent to the concept of a transitivity prototype which have to a large extent gone unanswered. Indeed, the appeal to the overarching concept of transitivity in the analysis of its component phenomena (e.g. differences in the encoding of clauses with perfective and imperfective aspect) is not so much an explanation as a higher-order description. If a prototype model of transitivity is to provide explanations of linguistic phenomena rather than simply better descriptions, it will need to provide answers to at least the following questions: 1) Why does the prototype exist at all – what is it for? That is, why do languages converge on such a set of semantic properties as characteristic of a certain type of clause, rather than each having their own independent criteria for the use of various kinds of structures? 2) Why does the prototype look the way it does? In other words, why do just these seemingly disparate properties correlate so closely across languages? This question has been asked, but never satisfactorily answered. For example, Hopper and Thompson (1980 :279) point out the need for an explanation of the correlation demonstrated between these various semantic properties – “a superordinate semantic notion which will include all the Transitivity components” – but are unable to provide one. Tentative explanations have been launched suggesting that the properties in question define the “prototypical event” or the “prototypical action” (DeLancey 1987, Lazard 2003). However, these do not succeed in independently establishing the “prototypicality” of this specific type of event as opposed to others, and so remain little more than conjectures. A third possibly relevant question, that of the apparent markedness of fully transitive clauses relative to other kinds of two-participant structures, will be explored in 2.3.4. below. In addition to these problems of explanation, it goes without saying that an essential requirement of any analytical model is that it should be descriptively adequate – that is, the specific predictions that follow from the model should be borne out across a wide range of empirical data. The main predictions that follow



Chapter 2.  Why a transitive prototype? 

from a prototype model of transitivity – independently of the exact formulation of the prototype as such – are: 1) that any clause which is formally distinct from the transitive clause in a given language should show a corresponding deviation from the semantic properties characteristic of transitive clauses. That is, if a clause is not transitive formally, then neither should it be prototypically transitive semantically (cf. Lazard 2003 :155) – unless of course some other factor can be identified which affects the formal properties of the clause. The notion of a prototype entails that a specific structure – in this case, the “transitive clause” – is typically used to convey a certain semantic content – the prototype. The choice of a structure different from the one in question must then be taken to reflect a desire to convey a semantic content different from that specified by the prototype. 2) Conversely, the prototype model predicts that all clauses which fulfill the semantic criteria for transitivity should be formally transitive – or, to be exact, all semantically transitive constructions should behave in a similar way formally. Most languages provide alternative formal constructions to express what is essentially the same state of affairs. For instance, a passive clause may well be used to refer to a semantically “transitive” situation; indeed, passivisability has occasionally been proposed as a criterion for prototypical transitivity in specific languages, cf. Kittilä (2002a :23ff). In addition, formal transitivity depends not only on the semantic properties of the objective situation, but also on the way in which this situation is construed by the speaker (Wierzbicka 1995 :188) – which participants or aspects of a situation are cast as more or less prominent or relevant in the context. Thus the prediction is not that all situations corresponding to the semantic transitive prototype should always be expressed in formally transitive clauses, but rather that simple underived clauses referring to such situations should all show the same formal structure, and the same range of options for structural alternations. The extent to which these predictions are borne out for traditional definitions of the transitive prototype will be discussed in chapter 4, which will present a set of data rarely taken into account in discussions of prototypical transitivity.

2.3 Markedness vs. prototypicality 2.3.1 Comrie’s generalisation Among the properties listed above as characteristic of canonical or prototypical transitive clauses was that of having a highly individuated O argument. The term individuation is used to refer to a number of properties which determine the ex-



Prototypical Transitivity

tent to which a participant is perceived as an independent entity in the context; the most frequently cited are definiteness and animacy. The use of a definite NP singles out a referent as identifiable in the context and thus confers on it a higher degree of individuation than an indefinite NP, which downplays the specific identity of the entity in question. Similarly, animate – and particularly human – entities are more likely to be construed as independent individuals than inanimates. Hopper and Thompson (1980 :253) suggest that the link between transitivity and degree of individuation of the O can be explained in terms of the perceived effect of an act on a highly individuated entity, which is claimed to be stronger or more salient than on an entity low in individuation: “An action can be more effectively transferred to a patient which is individuated than one which is not; thus a definite O is often viewed as more completely affected than an indefinite one”. Similarly, they say, the effect of an action on an animate entity is more likely to be the focus of attention than a similar effect on an inanimate entity; “... in I bumped into Charles, there is likely to be a focus of attention on the effect of the event on Charles, or perhaps on both participants; but in I bumped into the table, it is less probable that something happened to the table, and more likely that the effect on the A is being highlighted” (Hopper and Thompson 1980 :253). Interestingly, an influential line of research in current functional typology appears to explicitly contradict the statement that prototypical transitive clauses have highly individuated O arguments. The observation sometimes referred to as “Comrie’s generalisation” (de Swart 2003, Næss 2007) states that “the most natural kind of transitive construction is one where the A is high in animacy and definiteness, and the P [= O] is lower in animacy and definiteness; and any deviation from this pattern leads to a more marked construction” (Comrie 1989 :128, my emphasis). This generalisation is based on linguistic evidence of two main types. The first is the existence of so-called direct-inverse systems, which mark the relative degree of individuation of the A and O participants directly on the verb. Individuation is here measured according to the so-called “Animacy Hierarchy” or “Nominal Hierarchy”, on which speech-act participants (SAPs), represented by 1st and 2nd person pronouns, are taken to outrank 3rd-person pronouns, which outrank personal names, which outrank other human-referring nouns, which outrank nonhuman animate-referring nouns, which outrank nouns referring to inanimates (see also chapter 7). It is the top part of the hierarchy which is relevant to direct-inverse marking; generally, the distinction between SAPs and non-SAPs. If the A partici3. Inverse-marking languages differ in whether they show an internal ranking between 1st and 2nd person, and if so, which of these outranks the other. They also differ in the strategies used when both participants are of equal rank.



Chapter 2.  Why a transitive prototype? 

pant outranks the O on the hierarchy – that is, if the A is an SAP and the O is not – a so-called “direct” form of the verb is used; but if the O outranks the A, the verb takes a different, “inverse” form: (2.5) Fox (Algic, Algonquian; LeSourd 1976 cited in Comrie 1989 :129): a. ne-waapam-aa-wa b. ne-waapam-ek-wa 1sg-see-direct-3 1sg-see-inverse-3 ‘I see him.’ ‘He sees me.’

The second phenomenon is so-called differential case marking, which will be discussed in more detail in chapter 7. The case-marking of objects of transitive clauses in particular is frequently found to depend on specific properties of the object noun phrase. In languages which use overt case-marking on some direct objects but not on others, the relevant distinguishing property tends to be definiteness as opposed to indefiniteness, or animacy/humanness as opposed to inanimacy. That is, in many languages definite objects receive overt case-marking but indefinite ones do not, or animate objects get case-marked but not inanimate ones (Comrie 1989, Bossong 1991, Aissen 2003). The precise distinction involved is subject to language-particular variation, so that, for example, Catalan uses case-marking for pronominal objects only, Pitjantjara case-marks both pronouns and personal names in object position, while in Sinhala all animate objects may optionally receive case-marking; in Hebrew all definite objects are case-marked, while in Turkish both definite and specific objects receive case-marking, whereas nonspecific objects do not (Aissen 2003 :450–454). What all these examples have in common, however, is that case-marking is used only on objects which are relatively high in definiteness or animacy; the opposite, case-marking of indefinite or inanimate objects but not definite or animate ones, appears never to occur. Thus a “more marked construction” – with overt case-marking as opposed to zero – is used when the object is definite or animate. The generally accepted functional explanation for these patterns, and the analysis which underlies Comrie’s generalisation, is that the most natural or least marked way of structuring the information in a clause is for the A to be higher in definiteness and animacy than the O; this is thought to reflect a typical pattern of human experience, where human protagonists are generally seen to act on nonhuman or inanimate entities. When, contrary to expectations, the O is presented as higher in individuation than the A, many languages choose to reflect this directly in linguistic structure. Thus the overt morphological marking discussed above – inverse marking on verbs, accusative case as opposed to no overt case-marking on objects – is seen as a morphological signal of the semantic or pragmatic markedness of definite and/or animate objects, an indication that the expected relationship between properties of A and O does not hold.



Prototypical Transitivity

It would appear that this markedness-based approach to the notion of transitivity is in direct contradiction to a prototype definition of the type presented in 2.2.2.: clauses which are labelled as “less natural” or “more marked” according to one approach are categorised as “prototypical” according to the other. In fact, the contradiction is only apparent, since prototypicality and markedness are two fundamentally different concepts; but it does cast an interesting light on the differences between these two approaches to the notion of transitivity, and not least on the different ways in which the term “transitive clause” is used. 2.3.2 Transitives vs. intransitives While Comrie’s generalisation refers explicitly to the relationship between the properties of A and O arguments – the O [P] – should be lower in definiteness and animacy than the A – the practical consequence of this is that clauses with definite or animate Os are viewed as “less natural” or more marked transitive clauses than clauses with indefinite and inanimate Os. There are languages, however, where this analysis leads to some rather surprising conclusions. Consider the following examples: (2.6) West Greenlandic (Eskimo-Aleut, Eskimo; Fortescue 1984 :85, glosses from Cooreman 1994) a. inuit tuqup-pai people.abs kill-tr.ind.3sg.erg.3pl ‘He killed the people.’ b. inun-nik tuqut-si-vuq people-ins kill-antip-intr.ind/3sg.abs ‘He killed people.’ (2.7) Chamorro (Austronesian, Western Malayo-Polynesian; Topping 1973 :83–85): a. Hu li ’e lepblo 1sg see def book ‘I saw the book.’ b. Manli’e’ yo’ lepblo indfO.see 1sg book ‘I saw a book.’ c. Macho’cho yo’ work 1sg ‘I worked.’



Chapter 2.  Why a transitive prototype? 

(2.8) Äiwoo (Reefs-Santa Cruz): a. Nuwopa-ee i-lââ-no-Ø nä-tä gino-u house-dem pfv-build-1minA-3minO irr-3min.poss.loc son-1min.poss ‘I built this house for my son.’ b. I-lâwââ nuwopa nä-tä gino-u 1minS.pfv-build house irr-3min.poss.loc son-1min.poss ‘I built a house for my son.’ c. I-wo-lâ ngä taon 1minS.pfv-go-out to town ‘I went out to town.’

In all these languages, the b. examples, with indefinite objects, are formally intransitive. (2.6b) is an antipassivised clause with an oblique object; unlike the definite object in (2.6a), this oblique object is not cross-referenced on the verb. Cooreman (1994) argues that the prefix man- on the verb in (2.7b) should also be analysed as an antipassive. Chamorro does not cross-reference syntactic arguments on the verb, but it does have different sets of subject pronouns for transitive and intransitive clauses. The postverbal subject pronoun yo’ in (2.7b) is identical to that found in the intransitive clause (2.7c), and different from the preverbal pronoun hu found in the clause with a definite object (2.7a). Äiwoo does cross-reference both subjects and objects on the verb, although there is no overt cross-referencing suffix for 3rd person minimal objects. The difference between transitive and intransitive person marking is nevertheless readily apparent, since intransitive subjects are marked by prefixes on the verb, while both transitive subjects and objects are marked by suffixes. The verb with indefinite object (2.8b) takes the same person marker as the intransitive verb in (2.8c), while the definite-object verb takes a subject suffix, and would have had an overt object suffix if the object had been other than 3rd person minimal. In all of these languages, then, the presence of an indefinite object leads to the use of a structurally intransitive clause; that is, indefinite O arguments are in fact not syntactic objects at all. This has the interesting consequence that, if Comrie’s 4. Person marking in Äiwoo follows the typologically rather unusual “unit-augmented” pattern (Cysouw 2003; Dunn, Reesink and Terrill 2002). The defining characteristic of such a system is that the category ‘you and I’ is a basic person category on a par with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person. Consequently, the term ‘singular’ is inappropriate for the number category which includes the pronouns referring to ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘you and I’, and ‘he/she’, as the ‘you and I’ pronoun has no singular but refers minimally to two people. The term ‘minimal’ is therefore used for this category; in addition, Äiwoo has the number categories ‘unit-augmented’ (minimal number plus one) and ‘augmented’ (minimal number plus more than one). For an overview of the system see Næss (2006).



Prototypical Transitivity

generalisation is to be taken literally, the “most natural transitive clause” in these languages is in fact an intransitive clause. What this suggests is not so much an irresolvable theoretical contradiction, but rather different perspectives on the precise content of the term “transitive clause”. 2.3.3 Transitivity and the maximal distinction of categories A semantic parallel to the discussion of the formal structures in (2.6–8) can be found in the work of Kemmer (1993). Kemmer presents a crosslinguistic analysis of middle constructions, initially defined as a category indicating that “the ‘action’ or ‘state’ affects the subject of the verb or his interests” (Lyons 1968 :363). A formal category fitting this rough description is found in a large number of languages and covers a wide range of semantic functions. In order to account for the relationship between these, Kemmer proposes an analysis in terms of what she calls “relative elaboration of events”. This is to do with the degree to which complex events are presented as composed out of several distinct parts, or as an indivisible whole. For example, in the English reciprocal sentence John and Mary kissed each other, a possible reading is that first John kissed Mary, and then Mary kissed John – that is, the event can be seen as being composed out of two distinct subevents. On the other hand, such a reading is not possible for John and Mary kissed, which can only be taken to mean that John and Mary simultaneously brought their lips together in a kiss – an interpretation which is also possible, but not obligatory, for the relatively “more elaborated” John and Mary kissed each other. A central factor influencing the elaboration of an event is the distinguishability of participants. In a two-participant event, the degree of distinguishability of its participants is the degree to which the agent is construed as physically and conceptually distinct from the patient. The notion of physical distinctness is fairly self-explanatory; the reflexive sentence John hit himself is an example of a sentence which presents an event as though it had two participants (John and himself), but where these participants are physically the same entity. Conceptual distinctness concern the extent to which the participants play clearly distinct roles in the event. This notion will be explored in more detail in chapter 3. According to Kemmer, the distinguishability of participants is central to the notion of semantic transitivity, because semantically speaking, constructions with a low degree of distinguishability of participants are “more like prototypical oneparticipant events, which involve a single indivisible participant” (Kemmer 1993 :213). That is, how an event involving two participants is encoded formally depends on how clearly distinct from each other the participants are perceived as being, both physically and conceptually. Thus, in reflexives, the agent and patient participant are physically the same entity; in reciprocals, both participants show



Chapter 2.  Why a transitive prototype? 

both agentive and patientive characteristics and so cannot be clearly separated into one agent and one patient participant. In both of these cases, the lack of a clear distinction between agent and patient renders the event semantically more similar to an event involving one single participant, and as a result, they tend to get encoded formally in intransitive constructions. It should be noted that Kemmer distinguishes explicitly between her notion of relative participant distinguishability, which refers to the distinguishability of one participant from another, and that of individuation, which is more a question of the relative salience of a participant with respect to the general background. She does note, however, that the two concepts are clearly related (Kemmer 1993 :66), and I propose that it may be fruitful to incorporate both into a more general notion, which we might label distinctness of participants – including both the distinctness of each participant from the general background, and their distinctness from each other in terms of their physical and semantic properties. From this perspective, the patterning seen in examples (2.6–8) receive a semantic explanation: the indefinite O arguments are low in individuation, and so the events in question do not involve two clearly distinct and individuated entities; therefore they are semantically more similar to intransitive events, and are formally encoded as such. Semantically as well as formally, then, the consequence of Comrie’s generalisation is that the “most natural transitive clauses” appear to be those two-participant clauses which are most similar to intransitives. An analysis of transitive semantics in terms of the distinctness of participants points back to a basic principle of prototype definitions discussed in 2.2.1. above: categories are defined in relation to opposing categories in the same domain. That is, it is a crucial property of the definition of a prototypical transitive clause that such a clause is taken to be maximally distinct from a prototypical intransitive clause; and so any deviation from the transitive prototype must be taken to bring a clause closer to semantic and formal intransitivity. On the traditional conception of transitivity, the main defining property of a transitive clause is that it has two syntactic arguments – that is, two participants which are both accorded a high degree of syntactic prominence. This is in contrast to an intransitive clause which has only one syntactic argument. The notion of distinctness of participants provides a semantic parallel to this syntactic distinction, as it requires a transitive event to have two conceptually prominent participants. Clearly, any deviation from this premise of two highly prominent participants – typically towards having one highly prominent and one less prominent participant – will bring a clause closer to the intransitive prototype where only one participant is present in the formal structure. Thus both the basic principles of the prototype model and the notion of the distinctness of participants ultimately reflect the basic syntactic opposition between transitive and intransitive clauses. As such, the concept “transi-



Prototypical Transitivity

tivity” which they define is in fact closely linked to the traditional notion of transitivity as being basically a question of one vs. two arguments. The advantage of a prototype approach based on the distinctness of participants is that it also allows for gradability, because the underlying semantic concept – that of one vs. two independent participants – is gradable based on the perceived degree of independence of the participants involved. It is this property of prototype categories – the principle of maximal distinction –which leads to the fundamental difference between a prototype definition of a transitive clause on the one hand, and the markedness analysis underlying Comrie’s generalisation on the other. The two approaches take different entities as the standard of comparison against which the clauses with indefinite/inanimate O participants are measured. The markedness analysis defines as “marked features” exactly those properties which distinguish transitive from intransitive clauses: a second independent argument as opposed to one which is framed as less clearly distinct from the general background or from the other argument of the clause, explicit formal marking of the O NP as opposed to less overt morphological expression of the object relation. In other words, two-participant clauses are taken to be “less marked” or “more natural” the closer they are, formally and semantically, to intransitive clauses; the underlying, implicit standard of comparison is a clause with only one overtly expressed argument, an intransitive clause. By contrast, a prototype definition will necessarily define a prototypical transitive clause as one that is maximally distinct from an intransitive clause, and two-participant constructions will be categorised as more or less transitive on the basis of their resemblance to this prototype. What this suggests is that the term “transitive clause” is in fact being used in two rather different senses in prototype models and in markedness analyses based on Comrie’s generalisation. What is referred to in this generalisation as the “most natural transitive construction” is in fact the least morphologically marked twoparticipant clause, whereas a prototype-based approach defines as “transitive” only those structures which are clearly formally and semantically distinct from intransitive clauses. It would appear that the two are not necessarily the same thing. 2.3.4 The markedness of prototypically transitive clauses The implicit premise for Comrie’s generalisation is that the most “natural” kind of clause is an intransitive clause; it defines a two-participant construction as “more marked” or “less natural” the more it deviates from the basic intransitive formal pattern. Indeed, such an interpretation may be supported by the original formulation of Comrie’s generalisation, which states that “... any deviation from this pattern leads to a more marked structure”. Crucially, this is not the same as saying



Chapter 2.  Why a transitive prototype? 

that clauses with definite/animate objects are more marked transitive clauses, although in practice, this is how the generalisation has often been interpreted; for instance, Aissen’s (2003) analysis of differential object marking is based on the assumption that highly individuated objects are “marked qua objects” (Aissen 2003 :438), in other words that they are more marked than other kinds of syntactic objects. However, since in many languages the only alternative to a clause with a definite object is a clause with no syntactic object at all, a reasonable alternative interpretation is simply that such clauses are marked with respect to other ways of encoding two-participant events; that is, as formally intransitive clauses. This would imply that the clause type defined by the transitive prototype represents a marked kind of structure compared to other clause types of a language. This may seem like a contradiction in terms, since it may be tempting to assume that “prototypical” in some sense implies “unmarked”. However, prototypicality and markedness are two entirely distinct and independent concepts, and the one neither entails nor excludes the other. The only claim that follows from a prototype definition of transitivity is the following: all languages, or at least a significant majority of languages, have a syntactic construction whose central, prototypical function is to refer to events characterised by exactly the set of properties which make up the semantic transitive prototype. In other words, the prototype represents the prototypical reference of this particular structure, and says nothing about the relationship of this structure to other formal structures of a language. There is no reason why the category defined by the prototype cannot enter into a markedness relation where it is the marked member of an opposition to some other category. We can thus interpret the above discussion as indicating that formally transitive clauses, in the sense of the structure whose prototypical function in a given language is to refer to events characterised by the semantic properties taken to make up the transitive prototype, are in fact inherently marked structures. This would seem to imply that the event type specified by the transitive prototype is a conceptually marked type of two-participant event, or at least a marked way of representing a two-participant event. If this is the case, then it represents an additional challenge to any attempt at formulating a semantic transitive prototype: ideally, one should be able to explain what is it about the nature of this prototype that leads to its expression in formally marked constructions. This is a question which to my knowledge has not been addressed in previous research; a possible answer will be proposed in chapter 3.



Prototypical Transitivity

2.4 Conclusion The essential property of a prototype approach to transitivity is that it defines the transitive clause in clear opposition to the intransitive – the construction most formally and semantically distinct from the intransitive. It is transitivity in this sense which I will be concerned with in the remainder of this book. It is in principle possible to define the term ‘transitive clause’ in the way implied by the markedness approach discussed in 2.3 – as any construction overtly encoding two participants, with some such constructions being more marked “transitive clauses” than others. However, such a definition rather obscures the whole transitive-intransitive distinction, since it allows some “transitive clauses” to share formal properties with intransitives, while others have a set of formal characteristics all their own. “Formally and semantically distinct from the intransitive” is a fairly general formulation. In the next chapter, I will explore in more detail exactly which semantic properties are likely to lead to the encoding of a clause as clearly formally distinct from an intransitive, and why this should be so; I will, in short, propose a definition of the semantic transitive prototype.

chapter 3

Defining the transitive prototype: The Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis

3.1 Introduction In the previous chapter, I introduced the notion distinctness of participants as a basic criterion for transitivity. I argued that a fundamental characteristic of a semantically transitive event is that the two participants involved are perceived as clearly distinct – both in terms of the distinctness of each participant from the general background, and of their physical and conceptual distinguishability from each other. In this chapter, the notion of distinctness of participants will be developed and refined. The main question to be asked is: What exactly does it mean for the two participants in an event to be clearly distinct from each other? The answer to this question will form the basis for a definition of the transitive prototype which to a large extent follows from the principles discussed in the previous chapter, most notably that of the maximal distinction of categories. I will then examine the implications of this definition for the questions posed in the previous chapter concerning the nature and implications of a prototype definition of transitivity. I will attempt to show that the proposed definition provides principled answers to at least some of the questions which have proved problematic for previous conceptions of the transitive prototype.

3.2 The maximally distinguished arguments hypothesis 3.2.1 Transitivity and the distinguishability of participants In the previous chapter, it was noted that a crucial property of prototype categories is that they are defined in maximal opposition to contrasting categories within the same domain. Thus it is an essential property of a prototype definition of a transitive clause that it singles out the properties which distinguish such clauses from the main contrasting category, namely intransitive clauses. It was argued that this



Prototypical Transitivity

is the explanation for the relevance of the property “individuation of O”: in order to be clearly distinct from an intransitive clause, a transitive clause must necessarily have a second individuated participant clearly independent of and distinct from the other argument of the clause. However, the approach to semantic transitivity proposed by Kemmer (1993), outlined in 2.3.3., suggests that the notion of maximal contrast may be relevant on another level as well. Recall that the property “distinguishability of participants” depended on the physical and conceptual distinctness of the participants in the event. In Kemmer’s terms, a fully transitive event has one “Initiator” which instigates the event, and one “Endpoint” which registers the effects of the event. The categories Initiator and Endpoint subsume a number of different participant roles associated with distinct phases of an event. Initiator-type roles are conceptualised as “starting points” for an event, such as agents, experiencers, or mental sources. Endpoints are participants associated with the termination of an event, including patients, recipients and beneficiaries. In what Kemmer calls a prototypical two-participant event, corresponding to what will here be called a (semantically) transitive event, it is a basic requirement that the Initiator and the Endpoint participants be two physically distinct entities, and that the event involve some kind of transmission of force from the Initiator to the Endpoint participant. Kemmer further specifies that the initiating entity – an agent, in this particular case – should be human and acting volitionally, while the Endpoint – a patient – should be inanimate, definite, and completely affected by the event instigated by the agent. This conceptualisation of semantic transitivity is more or less identical to that outlined in 2.2.2. (though see 3.2.2 below for discussion of the postulated requirement that the patient participant be inanimate). Kemmer’s notion of relative distinguishability of participants defines a cline from fully transitive, two-participant events at one end, through various intermediate event types, to basic intransitive, one-participant events on the other. Thus, “[t]wo-participant events have maximal distinguishability of participants in that the participants are completely separate entities. The reflexive and middle have progressively lower distinguishability, which means that the Initiator (controller or conceived source of action) and Endpoint (affected participant) are not separate, but necessarily the same entity. Therefore the Initiator is also affected” (Kemmer 1993 :73). In her analysis of reflexives and middles, Kemmer refers mainly to the physical distinctness of the Initiator and Endpoint participants. However, her analysis of reciprocals suggests another way in which participants may be more or less distinguishable. The details of the analysis are is mainly to do with the extent to which a reciprocal event must be seen as involving two distinct subevents (for example, John and Peter hit each other necessarily describes two distinct acts of hit-



Chapter 3.  Defining the transitive prototype 

ting, one where John is the Initiator and Peter the Endpoint, and another where Peter is the Initiator and John the Endpoint) or can refer to a single, inherently reciprocal event (John and Mary kissed can refer to a single kiss in which both John and Mary act as both Initiators and Endpoints). However, in comparing the reciprocal to the reflexive, with which it frequently shares formal encoding, Kemmer notes that what these two event types have in common is that “in both cases each participant is both an Initiator and an Endpoint” (Kemmer 1993 :98). It is essential to note that the concepts of “distinguishability” at issue in these two cases are of a fundamentally different nature. With reflexives, it is a matter of purely physical distinguishability: the Initiator and Endpoint are in fact physically the same entity, although the situation is still construed as involving both an Initiator and an Endpoint. Reciprocals, on the other hand, necessarily involve two distinct participants. What is at issue here is the distinctness of the participants’ roles in the event: when both participants act as both Initiator and Endpoint of the same event, the distinction inherent to the prototypical two-participant event, between one single Initiator and one single Endpoint, is lacking. The two participants are not conceptually distinct: they are both involved in the event in essentially the same way. This has interesting consequences for the analysis of prototypical transitivity. If the distinguishability of participants is a criterion for semantic transitivity, then it is clearly not sufficient that an event should involve an initiating or agentive participant and an endpoint or patientive participant; there should be only one Initiator/agent, and only one Endpoint/patient. The distinction is crucial, since reciprocal events fulfill the first criterion, but not the second. In other words, there should be a polar distribution of agentive and patientive properties across the participants of a fully transitive events. If both participants show some “agentive” and some “patientive” properties, then they are less clearly distinguishable, and the result may be a less transitive construction, such as is found with the reciprocal in many languages (e.g. Shibatani 1985, Givón 2001b). A prototypical transitive event, then, involves a prototypical agent and a prototypical patient, neither of which shares any of the defining properties of the other. The fact that prototypicality tends to be recursive is noted by Taylor (1995 :61): “the very attributes on whose basis membership in a category is determined are more often than not themselves prototype categories.” We remember from the previous chapter that a fundamental property of prototype categories is that they are defined in maximal distinction to each other. The notion of distinguishability implicit in Kemmer’s analysis of reciprocals suggests that the participants of a prototypical transitive clause should themselves be conceived of as prototype categories, where a reduction of the semantic opposition between them – the distinction be-



Prototypical Transitivity

tween one single Initiator or agent and one single Endpoint or patient – implies a reduction in the semantic transitivity of the event. What this means is that the distinctness of participants proposed as a basic criterion for transitivity in the previous chapter is not only a distinctness of physical entities, but a distinctness of the semantic roles involved in a transitive event. We have already suggested that the principle of distinctness of participants can be employed to account for the encoding of clauses with indefinite objects as formally intransitive, because such clauses do not involve two clearly distinct participants. We will now expand this analysis to include the semantic specifications of the roles played by the participants in the event, which can be formulated as the following hypothesis: (3.1) The Maximally Distinct Arguments Hypothesis A prototypical transitive clause is one where the two participants are maximally semantically distinct in terms of their roles in the event described by the clause.

The two participants of a transitive clause are most commonly labelled “agent” and “patient”. Therefore, another way of formulating the hypothesis would be to say that the agent and patient categories should be defined in maximal opposition to each other. That is, it should be part of the definition of the category “agent” that it does not show any of the defining properties of patients; and conversely, it should be part of the definition of the category “patient” that it does not show any of the defining properties of agents. It remains, of course, to establish what exactly are the defining properties of agents and patients, respectively. The next section will discuss this question, and will propose a definition of the categories “Agent” and “Patient” in terms of the opposition of these defining properties. I will claim that the transitive prototype is in fact adequately defined by the opposition of these two categories; the rest of the book will be dedicated to showing that such a definition is empirically adequate, and that it allows for a number of theoretical insights which are not accounted for by previous approaches. 3.2.2 Inherent vs. relational properties As was noted in the previous chapter, it is frequently assumed that there is an opposition between subjects and objects of transitive clauses in terms of the properties of definiteness and animacy, in other words in what has been called degree of individuation. NPs in subject position are most typically definite and animate, and it is argued that it is “most natural” for objects to be indefinite and inanimate, or at least lower in definiteness and animacy than the clause’s subject.



Chapter 3.  Defining the transitive prototype

The difference between this proposal and that advanced here lies in the type of properties that are being contrasted. Definiteness and animacy are properties of noun phrases and their referents, independently of their function in the clause. What is argued, then, is that the “naturalness” or “markedness” of the clause as a whole depends on which noun phrase types – definite vs. indefinite, referring to animate vs. inanimate entities – are found in the syntactic positions of subject and object. This is given an explanation in terms of the correlation between such properties and the natural propensities of participants to fulfill certain roles – animate participants have a high propensity for active participation, that is, agency, and are therefore more likely to be subjects, whereas inanimate participants are more inherently likely to be patients, and therefore, objects. The idea of a maximal contrast between one agent-like and one patient-like argument of transitive clauses has sometimes been taken to be in conflict with the notion of a transitive clause as involving two highly individuated arguments, because highly individuated human participants are ascribed a natural propensity for agency and so are taken, by implication, to be “less natural” patients. Wierzbicka (1995 :198) writes: “The matter is complicated because a highly transitive clause requires two highly individuated arguments, and human objects tend to be more highly individuated than inanimate ones. Nonetheless the meaning encoded in a ‘cardinal transitive clause’ (cf. Hopper and Thompson 1980) presupposes a maximum contrast between the two arguments, one active (a human agent) and one passive (an inanimate object purposefully acted upon)”. There are several important distinctions to be kept apart in this discussion. The first is the one between transitive clauses and two-participant clauses, discussed in the previous chapter, where it was argued that the opposition between a highly individuated subject and a less individuated O argument actually defines the most unmarked two-participant clause, which is not necessarily the same as the prototypical transitive clause. The second is the distinction between the inherent properties of a noun phrase or noun phrase referent on the one hand, and the properties that define the relation of an argument to its predicate on the other. Definiteness and animacy are inherent properties, whereas “agency”, “patienthood” and similar (see below for a discussion of these terms) are relational properties. It is crucial to keep in mind that these two types of properties are in principle independent of each other. That is, assuming an opposition in transitive clauses in terms of relational properties – a “maximum contrast” between an “active” and a “passive” participant – does not entail a corresponding contrast in the inherent properties of the noun phrases representing the arguments in question. On the contrary, the contrast entailed by Kemmer’s notion of physical and conceptual distinctness is one of two individuated, independent entities which stand in maximally distinct relations to the event. From this perspective, a relatively high de-





Prototypical Transitivity

gree of individuation of both participants may well be a prerequisite for the distinctness of relations. Indeed, Sasse (1984) claims that it is precisely the pragmatic prominence of a highly individuated patient which motivates the grammatical relation of direct object to begin with: “The unmarked combination of non-individuation and patiency is pragmatically irrelevant; its pragmatic relevance is indeed so low that its status as a participant of the predicate tends to become effaced by incorporation [cf. the examples in 2.6–8, ÅN]. This clearly shows that only individuated items are candidates for G[rammatical] R[elations] due to their inherent pragmatic prominence” (Sasse 1984 :259, emphasis in original). That is, it is in a sense “marked” for a patient to be highly individuated, but it is exactly this markedness relation which give such patients the high information value required to justify encoding them as separate syntactic arguments. This supports the suggestion made in the previous chapter that prototypical transitive clauses may in a certain sense be conceived of as “marked structures”. It also underscores the point that the proposed “natural” contrast between a highly individuated A and a less individuated O participant is irrelevant to an attempt at determining the transitive prototype. Its relevance lies at a completely different level of analysis, namely that of the relative markedness of different two-participant constructions, which will be discussed further in 3.3 below. 3.2.3 The trouble with agents Perhaps the simplest semantic definition of a transitive clause states that such a clause has an “agent” and a “patient” argument. It was proposed above that the categories “agent” and “patient” should be defined in maximal opposition to each other; that is, we should explicitly include in the definition of an agent that it lacks the properties taken to define a patient, and vice versa. It remains to be established what the relevant defining properties of agents and patients should be. This is a far from uncontroversial question; the notion of “agent” in particular has been subject to a considerable amount of debate in linguistic literature, and no definite consensus has yet been reached as to how exactly this category should be defined. As early as 1973, D.A. Cruse pointed out that “There is a [...] divergence of opinion over which nouns (or verbs etc.) are to be considered agentive” and that “in view of this indeterminacy, it seems worthwhile to attempt a critical examination of the notion of agentivity, in the hope that a clearer characterization of it might emerge” (Cruse 1973 :11). There has been no lack of critical examinations, though the characterisations emerging from them vary. One of the earliest attempts in modern linguistics at providing a semantic definition of the different types of arguments a verb may exhibit is found in Fillmore’s Case Grammar (1968). Here “agentive” is defined as



Chapter 3.  Defining the transitive prototype 

“the case of the typically animate perceived instigator of the action identified by the verb” (Fillmore 1968: 24). The year before, Gruber (1967) defined an “agentive verb” as a verb “whose subject refers to an animate object which is thought of as the wilful source or agent of the activity described in the sentence” (Gruber 1967 :943). Cruse, after discussing these and similar views, proposes that agency as such is distinct from both volition and initiation, and that the semantic feature “agentive” “is present in any sentence referring to an action performed by an object which is regarded as using its own energy in carrying out the action” (Cruse 1973 :21, my emphasis). In general, terms such as volitionality, control and causation recur in discussions about typical agent properties (e.g. DeLancey 1984, Givón 1985a, Langacker 1991). Prompted by the large amounts of discussion and the persistent failure of the linguistic community to reach any kind of consensus over the matter, many linguists have questioned the possibility of achieving a unitary definition of the category “agent”, or even the relevance of the concept as such. Dowty (1991) writes that “[agent] is in some sense a very intuitive role, but it is one of the hardest to pin down”, citing approaches such as Jackendoff (1987) where a division is made between “Agent” and “Actor”, and the aforementioned Cruse (1973) where “agentive” is distinguished from both “volitive”, “effective” and “initiative” (Dowty 1991 :553). He argues for an approach in terms of role prototypes, where arguments may bear greater or lesser resemblance to the agentive or patientive prototype, labeled “Proto-Agent” and “Proto-Patient” respectively. In Jackendoff (1990), it is argued that “the traditional notion of Agent” is in fact composed out of several distinct parts, namely “doer of action”, “volitional Actor”, and “extrinsic instigator” (Jackendoff 1990 :129). Animate Actors are taken to be generally ambiguous between “extrinsic instigator” and “volitional actor” unless the verb specifically selects for a volitional agent; that is to say, there is a general tendency towards interpreting animate Actors as volitional, even when this is not specified by the verb. Van Valin and Wilkins (1996) pick up on this idea and attempt to show that the notion of agent is in fact a derivative one rather than the semantically basic concept it is often taken to be. Among other things, they argue that very few verbs in English actually require an agent argument, and, following Holisky (1987), that “the interpretation of an argument as an agent is a pragmatic inference or implicature and not an inherent property of the verb’s semantic representation” (Van Valin and Wilkins 1996 :289). The property of somehow instigating or causing an event, then, is taken to be basic, and the notion of volitional agency arises from a general tendency to interpret human effectors as acting volitionally. These discussions are interesting not so much for the conclusions they reach, but for the conception of the notion of “agency” that appears to underlie them.



Prototypical Transitivity

Statements such as the agent role being “hard to pin down” or being subject to a “divergence of opinions” suggest that what is really under discussion here is some preconceived notion of agency which linguistic theory should somehow be required to incorporate. This preconception is perhaps illustrated most clearly by a statement by Schlesinger (1989 :194): “It is generally recognized that intention is not a necessary feature of agentivity, for after all we often do things accidentally”. This argument in effect amounts to saying: “There are certain entities that I think of as agents; and since some of them are not intentional, intention cannot be a necessary feature of agentivity”. This points to a type of ontological fallacy which appears to be quite common in discussions of argument types or thematic roles in general, and of agents in particular: the category “agent” is treated as if it were an independently existing feature of language as such rather than a descriptive tool for linguistic analysis. Speaking of the agent as a “derivative” notion or as an entity “hard to pin down” suggests that “agent” is considered to be an entity inherent to language which it is the task of linguistic theory to describe, rather than a category imposed on language by analysts in order to describe and understand language structure. But the most crucial property of the concept of “agent” is that it is not a category of language as such; it is a classificatory tool which enables linguists to generalise over classes of entities which in some respect or other show similar behaviour in human language. In other words, there is no “correct” definition of the category “agent”. The hunt for such a definition in fact confuses definition with description, by assuming that there are certain entities which must a priori be taken to be agents, and that the task of defining the agent category amounts to correctly describing these entities. Definitions, however, do not have truth values, but are essentially statements of intent: “For the purposes of this analysis I will designate entities with properties X, Y and Z with label L”. The only criterion by which one can judge a definition of a linguistic term is the extent to which it provides for relevant generalisations; that is, whether it defines a set of entities which show similar linguistic behaviour in some way. There is thus nothing in principle wrong with my defining the category “agent”, say, as consisting of all human females over the age of forty holding academic positions. Naturally, such a definition is useless as far as linguistic analysis is concerned, since no known language treats the members of this category in a manner which sets them apart, structurally speaking, from all other entities referred to by noun phrases. But one cannot argue against such a definition of “agent” by claiming that it cannot be correct because there are entities which “do things” but which are not academically employed middle-aged women. All this line of argumentation achieves is setting up a competing definition of “agent” as “entities which do



Chapter 3.  Defining the transitive prototype 

things”, without any further arguments for why this definition is better than the one it seeks to replace. But the only valid argument against this or any other definition of “agent” is to show that it does not correspond to any distinction that can be observed in the formal systems of languages, and that, therefore, it is not a useful definition for the purposes of linguistic analysis. The definition which will be proposed here is therefore not necessarily meant to replace any or all of the “agent” categories discussed above, and it certainly does not claim to be the only correct definition of the term “agent”. All it sets out to do is define a category which will be shown to be of relevance to the analysis of the particular phenomenon under discussion here, namely transitive constructions. Given the amount of debate over the term “agent”, perhaps it would have been sensible to choose another label altogether. However, as the category to be defined below is very close to the kind of concept usually referred to by the term “agent”, I have chosen to keep this term rather than add to the profusion of category labels used to describe broadly similar concepts. 3.2.4 Participant roles vs. thematic relations Quite independently from the debate over the precise properties which should be taken as characteristic of the “agent” category, the term has been used in linguistic literature to describe (at least) two different kinds of category. Van Valin and LaPolla (1997) label the relevant categories of theoretical entities “participant roles” and “thematic relations” respectively. Participant roles are the roles that participants play in states of affairs, that is, they are extralinguistic entities. On this perspective, an agent participant is a participant that exhibits certain properties in a given instance of acting. If, for instance, John breaks a glass on purpose, then John is an agent; this holds independently of any semantic properties or requirements of the verb ‘break’ in any given language (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997 :85). By contrast, thematic relations, also known as thematic roles, are entities of language, although their precise status and definition are debated (see e.g. Dowty 1991). Van Valin and LaPolla define thematic relations as “[t]he semantic relations between a predicate and its arguments which express the participant relations in the state of affairs denoted by the verb” (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997 :113). Crucially, thematic roles or relations are assigned by verbs to their arguments; they are requirements imposed by the semantics of a verb on the arguments it may cooccur with, independently of any given use of the verb in a sentence. It is this conception of thematic relations that leads Van Valin and Wilkins to assume that “agent” cannot be a basic category of grammar: since only a very few verbs in English strictly require an agentive argument (defined, presumably, as something like a volitional causer), there is no basis for assuming a thematic rela-



Prototypical Transitivity

tion “agent”. Rather, the relation in question should be something like “effector”, roughly defined as “the dynamic participant doing something in an event” (Van Valin and Wilkins 1996 :289), and agentivity is seen as an implicature deriving from the propensity to ascribe agentive properties to human actors. It is argued that since there are verbs which may take either volitional or nonvolitional subjects, such as break, “it cannot be the case that being an agent is solely a verbal property” (Van Valin and Wilkins 1996 :307). If agency is not entirely a lexical property of verbs, then it cannot be represented in the logical structures for verb lexemes, and these logical structures are the basis for the definitions of thematic relations in the RRG framework advocated by Van Valin and Wilkins. Despite the difficulties in deriving a coherent notion of “agent” directly from generalisations across the semantic requirements of verbal lexemes, there can be little doubt that the notion of volitional instigation or causation of an event, which is what seems to underlie the concept of “agency” under discussion here, is of significant relevance to language structure. Thus, for instance, in Kiowa (KiowaTanoan, Watkins 1980) only “agents”, in the sense of volitional instigators of an action, may be transitive subjects; Lotha (Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman; Dahlstrom 1983) has a special clitic marking subjects of transitive or intransitive verbs that are “agentive” (but no corresponding marker covering both non-agentive subjects and transitive objects, such as is found in typical “active” or “split-S” languages); many ergative languages reserve ergative marking for participants which exercise some measure of volitional control over the action (cf. chapter 7); and so forth. Clearly, then, there is a level of linguistic structure for which some kind of “agent” category is relevant; but this category is difficult to reconcile with thematic role theory because it is not always obligatory with the verbs which allow it. The problem may not lie in the notion of agency as such (assuming a definition along the lines of “volitional causer”), but perhaps rather in the notion of thematic relations. The difficulty of providing a coherent account of the relationship between agency and verbal semantics stems from the strict distinction between “thematic relations” as linguistic entities and “participant roles” as properties of extralinguistic states of affairs. We know that a given verb may in fact be compatible with different participant roles when it is used to describe different instances of states of affairs, for instance the case of English break, which may be used either for a volitional or a nonvolitional action. Therefore, the idea that there must be some unitary abstract “thematic relation” subsuming all possible participant roles that a given argument of a verb may have is precisely what leads to the vagueness of the concept of agency. If there is a crosslinguistically relevant category which we may label “agent”, and if a theory of thematic roles cannot handle this category in a consistent manner, it is quite conceivable that the flaw lies in the notion of thematic role rather than in that of agent. That this notion is in many re-



Chapter 3.  Defining the transitive prototype 

spects a problematic one is not a new observation – see e.g. the discussion in Dowty (1991). Nevertheless, theories of argument linking and the syntax-semantics interface continue to refer to thematic roles in some form or other, presumably for want of a better concept which will allow for coherent analyses of linguistic facts. In this book, no assumption will be made that verbs subcategorise for specific “thematic roles”. The terms ‘Agent’ and ‘Patient’, to be defined below, will be employed strictly as labels for clusters of properties exhibited by noun phrases (or, strictly speaking, by their referents) when these function as core arguments of specific clauses. In other words, these terms should be taken to refer to participant roles, in the terminology of Van Valin and LaPolla, rather than to thematic roles. In this way, we can unproblematically claim that, for instance, the subject argument of John (voluntarily) broke the bottle is an agent, without committing ourselves to the claim that the verb break requires an agent argument, or even that the verb imposes this reading on the argument. The other participant types to be discussed in chapter 5 should similarly be understood as participant roles rather than thematic roles. How this approach to the semantics of participant types can be employed in an analysis of semantic restrictions on verb-argument relations will be discussed in 5.4. 3.2.5 The properties of agents and patients Proposing a crosslinguistically applicable definition of any category is a complex and challenging task. As noted in the introduction, it is clear that only functional (rather than formal) categories can be compared across unrelated languages, since similarities in form may be entirely accidental and show no necessary correspondence with similarities of function. In order to compare categories across languages, we need to identify the forms in different languages which fill the same or comparable functions. It is fairly obvious, then, that any category posited as crosslinguistically relevant must necessarily be of a semantic or pragmatic nature. On the other hand, it is equally obvious that the semantic properties relevant for the definition of such categories can only be identified through examinations of linguistic structure. As was pointed out in 3.2.3., the purpose of a definition of a linguistic category is to provide for relevant generalisations across language data. Clearly, the properties which may be of relevance in proposing such generalisations must be those which are reflected in some way in actual linguistic patterns. The categories “agent” and “patient” are closely linked with that of “transitive clause” – indeed, they are often understood as mutually dependent concepts. Which structure should be analysed as “the transitive clause” in a given language is commonly determined on the basis of some notion of agents and patients. An-



Prototypical Transitivity

drews (1985 :68) defines a “primary transitive verb” as a two-argument verb taking an agent and a patient argument, and a transitive clause as one which is structurally identical to a clause containing a primary transitive verb; that is, it has two arguments which are treated morphologically and syntactically in the same way as the agent and patient argument of a primary transitive verb. At the same time, it is the structural behaviour of arguments of transitive clauses that ultimately determines the definition of agents and patients – as indeed must be the case if these categories are to have any validity as tools of linguistic analysis. For instance, Andrews (1985 :68) justifies the definition of patients as being “clearly affected” by the verbal event by stating that “in Northwest Causasian languages such as Abkhaz and Adyghe, verbs like hit take a different NP-marking strategy than verbs like kill (...), showing that the object of hit is no true Patient”. In other words, while the notion of “transitive clause” is defined in terms of the categories “agent” and “patient”, these categories are in turn defined in terms of the notion of “transitive clause”. There is in principle no way out of this analytical circle, simply because the categories in question describe aspects of the same phenomenon. However, this does not mean that it is in principle impossible to arrive at consistent, empirically grounded definitions of these concepts. The key lies in the observation of recurrent semantic-structural correlations across languages. If we examine a large number of languages with more than one type of morphosyntactic expression for two-participant events, we will note that the same kinds of semantic distinctions tend to correlate with differences in structure across languages. Thus, for example, there is a difference in a large number of languages in the formal encoding of clauses which have a highly affected O argument on the one hand, and clauses with a less affected or unaffected O argument on the other hand. Thus the property “affectedness” can be assumed to define, or be part of the definition of, a crosslinguistically relevant category which partly determines the use of certain types of clauses; the fact that this category is usually labelled “patient” and the clause type in which it typically occurs “transitive clause” is mainly a question of terminology. The definition of the categories agent and patient, then, should be based on properties seen to influence the formal encoding of two-participant clauses crosslinguistically. However, as noted in 3.2.2. above, such properties may be of two different types: inherent properties of the NP or NP referent, and properties defining the relation of the participant to the event described. ‘Agent’ and ‘patient’ are generally understood as names for (thematic or participant) roles, that is, types of relation a participant may enter into in an event. Inherent properties are therefore not directly relevant to the definition of these categories, although they may be indirectly relevant in that they may restrict the range of relational properties a given participant may show; for instance, it is not usually possible to construe an



Chapter 3.  Defining the transitive prototype 

inanimate participant as volitional. However, as ‘agent’ and ‘patient’ will here be used as labels for types of relations, only relational properties will be included in their definitions. A relational property which in many languages is relevant to clause encoding is volitionality or intentionality. As noted above, the relevance of this property to the concept of agency has been subject to some debate. However, the fact that volitionality is not a determining factor for the formal encoding of clauses in all languages must be understood as a consequence of the prototype nature of the categories “agent” and “transitive event”. If “agent” is a crosslinguistic category relevant to the encoding of two-participant events, and if part of the definition of this category is volitional involvement, all this implies is that the transitive clause in a given language will be used at least when the A participant is acting volitionally. Some languages will restrict the use of the transitive clause to such cases, whereas others will extend it to include less prototypical cases. What needs to be shown, rather, is that the notion of volitionality is relevant for the formal encoding of twoparticipant events in a significant number of languages. Indeed, many languages show formal distinctions between volitional and nonvolitional A participants. In the Daghestanian language Lezgian, for example, volitionally acting A participants of two-participant events are encoded in the ergative case, while nonvolitional ones, for at least some verbs, receive an oblique case: (3.2) Lezgian (Nakh-Daghestanian, Daghestanian; Haspelmath 1993a:292): a. Zamira.di get’e xa-na Zamira.erg pot break-aor ‘Zamira broke the pot.’ b. Zamira.di-waj get’e xa-na Zamira-adel pot break-aor ‘Zamira broke the pot accidentally/involuntarily.’

German allows a dative-nominative case frame for events which are construed as coming about accidentally, that is, without the volitional involvement of the A participant, as opposed to the canonically transitive nominative-accusative construction found with volitionally instigated events: (3.3) German (Indo-European, Germanic; Kittilä 2002a :133): a. Ich habe den teller zerbrochen I.nom have acc plate break.ptcp ‘I broke the plate.’ b. Mir ist der teller zerbrochen I.dat is nom plate break.ptcp ‘I broke the plate accidentally.’



Prototypical Transitivity

The Australian language Guugu Yimidhirr encodes nonvolitional instigators of twoparticipant events as oblique arguments of a reflexive construction, while volitional agents appear as nominative/ergative subjects of a canonical transitive clause: (3.4) Guugu Yimidhirr (Australian, Pama-Nyungan; Haviland 1979 :125): a. Ngayu galga nhanu dumbi 1sg.nom spear.abs 2sg.gen.abs break.past ‘I broke your spear [on purpose].’

b. Ngadhun.gal galga nhanu dumbi-idhi 1sg.adess spear.abs 2sg.gen.abs break-refl.past ‘I broke your spear [accidentally].’ In all these languages, it is a prerequisite for the use of a canonical transitive clause pattern that the A argument be volitionally involved in the instigation of the event. Participants whose instigation of the event is involuntary are encoded as obliques rather than as core arguments. It should be emphasised that “volitionality” must here be understood as a relational property (cf. 3.2.2 above), that is, as referring to the volitional involvement of a participant in a given instance of acting. An alternative interpretation of the term would be as an inherent property, that is, as being in possession of the capacity for acting volitionally, whether or not the participant in question actually excercises volition in any given event. Understood as an inherent property, volitionality is a typical characteristic of humans as opposed to nonhuman animates and inanimates, and is the basis for the frequent inclusion of a criterion along the lines of “typically human” in definitions of “agent” or of the transitive prototype. It has already been noted that since the terms “agent” and “patient” are used here as labels for types of relations between arguments and their predicates, they should be defined solely in terms of relational properties; inherent properties may be relevant for the ability of a participant to exhibit a certain relational property, but do not in themselves define semantic relations. The difference between volitionality viewed as a relational property and as an inherent property can be illustrated by the clause John murdered Peter. On the assumption that Peter here refers to a human being, he is in possession of volitionality as an inherent property of human beings, but presumably he does not exercise this volitionality where his role in this particular event is concerned; more importantly, his being volitional is not a prerequisite for his being able to fill this role. By contrast, where John is concerned, his involvement in the event requires the active exercise of volitionality, as

1. Guugu Yimidhirr shows NP-split ergative case-marking, with pronouns following a nominative-accusative case pattern while other nominals take ergative-absolutive marking; cf. chapter 7.



Chapter 3.  Defining the transitive prototype 

murdering someone is an act which necessarily involves a volitional agent; in other words, John’s role in the event is partly defined by the property of volitionality. The term “volitionality” will here be used for a fairly broadly defined concept as far as the precise nature of the participant’s involvement is concerned: a participant will be taken to be volitional if its involvement in the event in question is partly defined by its being volitional or sentient. This definition is intended to include experiencer arguments of verbs of cognition or perception; it is a prerequisite for a participant’s functioning as an experiencer that its cognitive capacities are actively engaged in the event (cf. e.g. Langacker 1991 :238–9, where agents and experiencers are grouped together as “active participants”). The term sentience has sometimes been used for this broad concept which includes rather more than what is traditionally understood by “volitionality”. I have nevertheless chosen to employ the latter term, mainly for the reason that “sentience” is to an even larger extent than “volitionality” interpretable as an inherent property, a capacity which an entity may or may not possess; what is at issue here is rather the exercise of this capacity in interacting with an event in a certain way. The specific choice of the term “volitionality” is meant to suggest that the exercise of volition in carrying out an event may be seen as the (proto)typical way in which participants involve their cognitive capacity in interacting with an event, even though it is not the only possible way. Volitional involvement is clearly not the only defining properties of “agents” in the sense of entities likely to be cast as subjects of transitive clauses. Volitionality as defined above is not sufficient for an argument to be encoded as a transitive subject in many languages; for example, arguments of verbs of experience qualify as volitional according to this definition, but famously tend to be encoded in oblique constructions across a range of languages (see e.g. Verma and Mohanan 1990b, Aikhenvald et al. 2001. Experiencer constructions will be discussed in more detail in chapter 8). One example is the “dative subject” construction found e.g. in Icelandic: (3.5)

Icelandic (Indo-European, Germanic; Andrews 1985 :102): Mér líkar vel við henni me.dat likes.3sg well with her.dat ‘I like her.’

Another example of an instance where a participant may show volitional involvement but nevertheless not be cast as a transitive subject is in negated clauses, which in some languages are treated differently from positive clauses, in the sense that only positive clauses are encoded as fully transitive. Thus Kolyma Yukaghir has two sets of person markers, one of which is used in intransitive clauses, the other in transitive clauses; negated transitive clauses, however, take the intransitive markers:



Prototypical Transitivity

(3.6) Kolyma Yukaghir (Yukaghir; Maslova 2003 :144, glosses from Miestamo 2005 :134): a. a:-te-mek b. el-a:-te-jek make-fut-tr.2sg neg-make-fut-intr.2sg ‘You will make.’ ‘You will not make.’

What examples such as these have in common is that the participants in question do not instigate the situations in which they participate – the experiencer argument in (3.5) does not necessarily act to instigate the experience (at least it is not a prerequisite for its being an experiencer that it do so), and in negated clauses the event is presented as not having taken place, and therefore cannot have been instigated. Indeed, the property of instigating or causing an event is central to our whole understanding of what an agent is; a simplistic description of a transitive event might refer to it as an act where one participant “does something to” another, where we understand the participant “doing something”, that is, instigating the event, as the agent (cf. the quote by Schlesinger in 3.2.3 above). For the A participant to actively instigate the event, then, is clearly a factor in the encoding of two-participant events across languages, and should be included in our definition of agent. An argument which volitionally causes or instigates an event corresponds quite closely to the traditional concept of “agent”, and it appears that these are indeed the main factors at the relational level which influence the encoding of A arguments in two-participant clauses across languages. There are languages where, in addition to these properties, inherent properties have an influence on the possibility for transitive subject encoding; for example, Yidiny (Pama-Nyungan, Yidinic) only allows animate arguments as transitive subjects, whereas inanimate “agents” trigger antipassive constructions (Dixon 1977, Palmer 1994 :185); and indefinite A arguments are often avoided or at least discouraged across languages. However, in terms of the properties characterising the semantic relation “agent”, a definition in terms of volitionality and instigation seems to capture the main crosslinguistic patterns attested. As far as the notion of “patient” is concerned, the main property typically taken to define this category is that of affectedness: a patient is generally defined as the participant which in some way undergoes a change of state as a result of the event. Affectedness of the O participant is a central factor in the encoding of twoparticipant clauses in a number of languages. For instance, Finnish encodes highly affected objects in fully transitive clauses with the accusative case, but less-affected objects take oblique (partitive) case-marking, whether their reduced affectedness



Chapter 3.  Defining the transitive prototype 

stems from only part of the object being affected (3.7a-b), or the nature of the verbal action being such that it impinges less strongly on the object (3.7c-d): (3.7) Finnish (Uralic, Finno-Ugric; Kittilä 2002b :113–114): a. Hän jo-i maido-n s/he drink-past.3sg milk-acc ‘S/he drank (all) the milk.’ b. Hän jo-i maito-a s/he drink-past.3sg milk-part ‘S/he drank (some) milk.’ c. Hän tappo-i miehe-n s/he kill-past.3sg man-acc ‘S/he killed the man.’ d. Hän lö-i mies-tä s/he hit-past.3sg man-part ‘S/he hit the man.’

Tongan similarly encodes partially affected objects in an oblique case rather than with the ergative-absolutive pattern found in clauses with fully affected objects: (3.8) Tongan (Austronesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian; Hopper and Thompson 1980: 263) a. Na’e kai-i ‘a e ika ‘e he tamasi’i past eat-tr abs def fish erg the boy ‘The boy ate the fish.’ b. Na’e kai ‘a e tamasi’i ‘i he ika past eat abs def boy obl the fish ‘The boy ate some of the fish.’

Many other languages show similar patterns, encoding strongly affected O arguments as transitive objects, but less-affected or unaffected Os in an oblique construction. As we saw in chapter 2, the definiteness of the O may also be a factor in argument encoding. However, this was argued to be a function of the general requirement that a transitive clause involve two clearly distinct arguments, and cannot be considered a defining property of the role of patient as such; as definiteness is an inherent rather than a relational property, it is not directly relevant to the definition of a semantic participant relation.



Prototypical Transitivity

3.2.6 Agent and patient as maximally distinct categories The definition of “agents” as volitional instigators and “patients” as affected participants is far from new. However, according to the Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis, these categories should be defined so as to be maximally semantically distinct; in other words, we should incorporate into the definitions the explicit absence of the defining properties of one category from the definition of the other. For the purposes of this definition, we will construe the properties discussed above – volitionality, instigation and affectedness – as binary properties which can be assigned the values ‘+’ or ‘–’. In reality the picture is, of course, rather more complex; affectedness in particular is clearly a gradable concept, and we can conceive of entities as being more or less affected. Therefore, feature assignments such as [+Volitional] or [–Affected] should be understood as referring to high or low values on what is in principle a semantic scale, that is, a ‘+’ essentially means “showing this property to a high extent”, and a ‘–’ “showing this property to little or no extent”. Nevertheless, the choice of a binary representation goes beyond mere convenience of notation, in that it is meant to reflect basic crosslinguistic generalisations; it will be demonstrated that the binary properties in fact go a long way towards accounting for patterns of variation in language. I will use the terms ‘Agent’ and ‘Patient’, with initial capital, for the categories defined in terms of these binary properties, to distinguish them from the more general concepts of ‘agent’ and ‘patient’. An Agent participant, then, will be defined as being +Volitional or [+VOL], and +Instigating or [+INST], while a Patient will be defined as +Affected or [+AFF]. In addition, by the Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis, each of the categories will receive the value ‘–’ for the defining property/properties of the opposing category, so that a complete definition of the category Agent will be [+VOL, +INST, –AFF], and of Patient [–VOL, –INST, +AFF]. This semantic opposition of Agent and Patient can be represented schematically as follows: Table 1.  Agent and Patient as maximally distinct categories

Volitionality Instigation Affectedness

Agent

Patient

+ + –

– – +

By the Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis, this feature configuration essentially defines the transitive prototype; the only additional specification needed is that both participants are directly involved in the same single event; that is, that



Chapter 3.  Defining the transitive prototype 

the affectedness of the Patient is a direct result of the event instigated by the Agent, and is the target of the Agent’s volitional act. The empirical predictions of this model are fairly simple: any deviation from the feature configuration presented in Table 1 will lead to the use of a structure distinct from the fully transitive clause in some language. Conversely, if Table 1 is to be taken as a sufficient definition of prototypical transitivity, then any differences in formal transitive marking must in principle be explainable in terms of deviations from this feature configuration. Evidence in support of both these points will be presented in chapters 4 and 5. The opposition between an entity actively instigating an event on the one hand and an entity passively affected by it on the other is frequently referred to in terms of control and affectedness. There is a considerable amount of literature regarding the precise content of the term ‘control’; see e.g. Brennenstuhl (1976), Farkas (1988), Klaiman (1991). When linguistic literature refers to a “controlling agent”, though, it appears that what is meant is essentially the volitional instigation and/or execution of an act, in other words, a notion more or less equivalent to the conjunction of our features [+VOL] and [+INST]. Although the two are in principle independent, it will prove convenient occasionally to be able to refer to the two positive semantic properties characteristic of the Agent category with a single term; I will therefore use the term ‘control’ to refer to “volitionality plus instigation”. The polar distribution of control and affectedness over the participants of a clause is recognised as an essential criterion of transitivity e.g. by Testelec (1998), who writes that “the less similarity is there [sic] between the two major participants of the predicate in terms of control and affectedness, the more semantically transitive is the verb” (Testelec 1998 :41). Testelec operates with the feature values [+control, –affected] for agents and [–control, +affected] for patients. Similarly, Wijayawardhana et al. (1995 :117–118), in a discussion of case in Sinhala, state that the “agent role is endowed with maximal control and absence of affectedness, patient role with absence of control and maximal affectedness”. One consequence of defining the participant roles in terms of a semantic opposition is that it eliminates the need, or indeed the possibility, of assigning multiple roles to a single argument, as has sometimes been done. For example, in the discussion cited above, Van Valin and Wilkins (1996) interpret the notion of agency as a pragmatic implicature arising from the combination of an “Effector” role (“the dynamic participant doing something in an event”) with a human participant which might be acting volitionally; similarly, Van Valin and LaPolla (1997 :118) argue that “agent is in effect an overlay over other, more basic thematic relations”. Such combinations of thematic roles are not unusual in linguistic literature. The obligatoriness of the Theme role in the original analyses of Gruber (1970) and Jackendoff (1972), for instance, led to certain arguments being characterised si-



Prototypical Transitivity

multaneously as Themes and as bearing another role, for instance that of Agent in agentive intransitives such as John moved away (Jackendoff 1972 :32). Blake (1982) similarly takes “[+patient]” to be a property which may be combined with other roles. Van Langendonck (1998 :215) refers to the participant type which will here be called Affected Agent (se chapter 4) as being a case where “the beneficiary is coreferent to the agent”. By the definition proposed here, an argument which at the same time has “agentive” and “patientive” properties cannot at the same time be an Agent and a Patient, because these are defined as mutually exclusive categories. What is possible – indeed, predicted – is that an argument may show other combinations of feature specifications than those which define the Agent and Patient, and so combine properties typically associated with agents and with patients. But being, for example, [+Affected] does not in itself make a participant a Patient, since affectedness is only a part of the definition of Patient proposed here. Rather, other labels must be found for “mixed” role types such as, for instance, [+Volitional, +Instigating, +Affected], which will be treated in chapter 4 under the heading “Affected Agent”.

3.3 Maximal distinction and functional explanations The basic principle behind this definition of the transitive prototype is a fairly simple one: a transitive clause is one which describes an event which involves two distinct, independent participants, both in the sense that they are physically distinct and independent entities, and in the sense that their roles in the event are clearly distinct: there is only one instigating agent and only one affected “endpoint”. The empirical implications of this proposal will be the topic of most of the remaining chapters of this book. First, however, let us examine what this conception of the transitive prototype can suggest regarding the questions posed in the previous chapter: why is there a seemingly universal transitive prototype, why does it look the way it does, and why do the structures used to express this prototype appear to be crosslinguistically marked with respect to other kinds of twoparticipant constructions? The principle of the maximal distinction of arguments suggests a fundamentally iconic relation between the semantic transitive prototype and the structures found to represent it in languages, which has been hinted at several times already: If the core function of a transitive clause is to represent an event as involving two clearly distinct, independent participants, then the use of two independent syntactic arguments can be taken to iconically reflect the involvement of two independent participants – independent both in the sense of physical distinctness from each other and from the general context, and in the sense of representing



Chapter 3.  Defining the transitive prototype 

clearly distinct types of involvement in the event; clearly agentive on the one hand, clearly patientive on the other. Thus, when the physical or conceptual border between the two participants starts to blur – either because one participant is presented as relatively less individuated, or because the roles played by the participants are perceived as less clearly distinct – this is reflected in linguistic structure by the use of constructions which do not accord equal formal prominence to both participant NPs. Some ways in which languages do this will be discussed in following chapters. This simple principle of iconicity provides a functional explanation for the apparent universality of the transitive prototype. It also suggests a perspective on another problem addressed in the previous chapter, namely the apparent markedness of fully transitive clauses relative to other types of two-participant constructions. The markedness relation referred to in chapter 2 was primarily that exhibited by clauses with definite/animate versus indefinite/inanimate objects, where a number of languages use overt case-marking on the former but not the latter. It was argued that this is not, as has been previously assumed, an indication that clauses with highly individuated objects are more marked transitive clauses, a formulation which suggests that there are other kinds of “transitive clauses” which are less marked. Rather, having a highly individuated O argument is one of the defining properties of a prototypical transitive clause – but such clauses may be a more marked type of two-participant construction compared to other ways of formally encoding events involving two participants. What, then, is “marked” about the transitive prototype? Markedness relations are to a large extent motivated by the principles of iconicity and economy, which are typically evoked as competing motivations in explanations of linguistic patterns (e.g. Croft 2001 :102). It should be noted, however, that iconicity itself should probably ultimately be understood in terms of economy of processing, what Givón (1985b) calls the “iconicity meta-principle”: “All other things being equal, a coded experience is easier to store, retrieve and communicate if the code is maximally isomorphic to the experience” (Givón 1985b:188, emphasis in original). However, the isomorphism in question is clearly not between linguistic structure and experience in itself, but between linguistic structure and the structure of our conceptualisation of a given experience. A frequently evoked keyword is salience, obviously a subjective concept, and one that can be manipulated for the purpose of imposing a particular structure on an inherently unstructured experience, by drawing particular attention to certain aspects of the experience in question. Thus Givón proposes that “[t]he more important an item is in the communication, the more distinct and independent coding expression it receives” (Givón 1985b:206, emphasis in original).



Prototypical Transitivity

In other words, distinct and independent coding of a linguistic item can be interpreted as a signal that particular attention should be paid to the referent of the item in question. We have argued that prototypical transitive structures are iconic in the sense that the use of two independent syntactic arguments reflects a situation where an event is being cast as involving two distinct, independent participants. But in terms of conceptual structure and demands on processing, it could be argued that such a way of representing events is to a certain extent uneconomical. It is well known that transitive clauses with two lexical noun phrase arguments are rare in discourse, and that languages tend to use intransitive clauses to introduce new referents before these referents are cast as arguments of transitive clauses (DuBois 1987). This is taken to reflect a processing constraint: the introduction of a new referent into discourse requires a high degree of attention on the part of both speaker and hearer. DuBois shows that as “information pressure” increases, that is, the ratio of new human participants (potential protagonists) to clauses, intransitive clauses become more frequent in the discourse as a means of introducing these new participants. In other words, it is difficult for the language processing mechanism to handle more than one new participant per clause, and syntactic and discourse structure reflects this constraint. It is not the processing of new information which is at issue in explaining the relative markedness of prototypical transitive clauses compared to other types of two-participant clauses, but there may be a parallel in terms of the amount of information which the processing mechanism is required to keep track of. The use of a prototypical transitive construction demands that the speaker and hearer keep track of two distinct participants which are both cast as highly prominent, independent entities and so should be accorded a more or less equal amount of attention. Clearly, this is more demanding than casting a situation in terms of one highly prominent participant and one which is less salient, of less independent interest, and so less demanding of individual attention. We may thus hypothesise that the use of a construction whose prototypical reference is to an event involving two independent entities with distinct semantic properties may be restricted to cases where some particular reason dictates that equal attention should be paid to both participants at once. In contrast to this, by choosing a formally intransitive construction to describe a two-participant event, the event in question is presented as a simple interaction between an individual and the world. In so doing, the speaker backgrounds any additional entities of secondary interest from the typically human subject participant’s point of view, by placing them in a syntactically less prominent position and thereby signalling that a lesser degree of attention needs to be paid to them. From this point of view, it is possible to understand why the “unmarked twoparticipant clause” appears in many languages to be a different kind of structure



Chapter 3.  Defining the transitive prototype 

from the “prototypical transitive clause”. The clauses with low-individuation objects are “more natural” or unmarked both in the sense that they structure the situation in terms of a single prominent participant and so are simpler in terms of information structure, and in that they cast the typically human agent participant as the primary focus of attention and accord relatively less importance to the undergoing participant typically being manipulated by the agent. The option found in many languages of encoding such situations in formally intransitive clauses reflects this relatively simple conceptual structure. By contrast, the prototypical transitive construction requires that both participants be construed as highly prominent, a relatively demanding task. One might label this a “marked” function which is only evoked when there is a need to focus on the independent identity of both participants simultaneously. Naturally, the exact conditions involved will depend, among other things, on the alternative constructions available in a given language. Transitivity being a prototype concept, the range of use of the “marked structure” – the transitive clause – will vary across languages, so that English employs a transitive clause for a fairly wide range of situations, including both low-individuation objects and, for instance, a number of experience events which in other languages will take other types of formal encoding. By contrast, in a language where object incorporation, antipassivisation or similar constructions serving to background the O participant are available, the range of use of the transitive clause will be much smaller, restricted to events where the O participant is presented as relatively high in individuation. That is, a fully transitive clause will be relatively “more marked” in e.g. a language with productive object incorporation, where it contrasts with a formally intransitive construction used when the independent identity of the O participant is of less relevance, than in English where it is used for a variety of situations which deviate from the semantic transitive prototype. This seems to me to be an essentially correct conclusion, a consequence of the interaction of the two concepts of prototypicality and markedness, and of the dynamics between iconicity and economy, which may be resolved in different ways in different languages. Most importantly, though, the notion of distinctness of participants as a basis for semantic transitivity can explain the crosslinguistic tendency for prototypically transitive clauses to be marked relative to other kinds of two-participant constructions. A question which remains to be answered is how this proposal relates to previous formulations of the transitive prototype, which include properties such as aspect, mood and negation. Chapter 5 will argue that all the properties known to influence transitivity can in fact be understood in terms of the maximal opposition between agent and patient, and thus that the principle of maximal distinction is a plausible candidate for the missing unifying principle behind the set of diverse properties usually taken to make up the transitive prototype.

chapter 4

The Affected Agent

4.1 Introduction The main claim put forward in the previous chapter was that the distinctness of the semantic roles of the participants in a two-participant event is a crucial factor in semantic transitivity. I argued that participants which are conceptually less distinct in that they are involved in the event in similar ways – for instance, by both participants being volitionally involved in the event, or both participants being directly affected by the event – are less likely to be formally encoded as two distinct, independent syntactic arguments. This and the following chapters will be devoted to presenting empirical evidence for this claim. The basic empirical prediction which follows from the model presented in chapter 3 is that any combination of semantic properties deviating from that specified in Table 1 may lead to the use of a construction distinct from the prototypical transitive clause in some language; I will demonstrate that this prediction is, in fact, borne out, although some combinations of properties are less frequently found to receive a distinct formal encoding than others. All of the properties included in the model are well known from previous formulations of the transitive prototype. There is, for example, solid documentation showing that O participants which are not affected, or As which are not volitional, may lead to variations in clause encoding in many languages. However, the discussion has focused on cases where the absence of a positive defining property of a given participant type leads to reduced transitivity. The claim of the Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis is that the presence of a defining property of the contrasting participant type on an argument may equally lead to a reduction in the transitivity of a clause. Such cases are considerably rarer in the literature, and it is possibly that this to a certain extent reflects a relative rarity of the phenomenon in languages. However, it probably also, at least in part, reflects a lack of awareness of the relevance of the concept of semantic distinction. This chapter will demonstrate that one particular instance of reduced formal transitivity through reduced semantic distinction of arguments is in fact fairly common, once one starts looking



Prototypical Transitivity

for it. This concerns cases where the agentive participant is further characterised by the main defining property of Patients, namely affectedness. There is considerable support in the literature for the idea that a prototypical agent is unaffected, although systematic empirical evidence for the relevance of this property has rarely been presented. For example, Langacker (1991 :238) states that in a canonical transitive clause, the agent “remains basically unaffected”; while Kittilä (2002a :237) gives as one of the defining features of a transitive event that “the agent is not affected”. The Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis places this observation in a larger theoretical context by stating that the requirement that the agent remain unaffected is a function of the more basic requirement that the two participants of a transitive event should be maximally distinct, conceptually as well as physically. This chapter will show that there is in fact a class of verbs crosslinguistically characterised by having an Affected Agent argument, namely so-called ingestive verbs, the most prototypical of which are ‘eat’ and ‘drink’. I will demonstrate that such verbs show a strong tendency crosslinguistically towards being expressed in formally intransitive clauses, and argue that the analysis of these verbs as having an Affected Agent can explain this “intransitive behaviour” better than any previous accounts that I am aware of. The ultimate goals of the chapter are to establish the Affected Agent as a relevant category for linguistic analysis, and to demonstrate that this category is crosslinguistically associated with low formal transitivity.

4.2 “Ingestive verbs” and affected agents The discussion in this chapter will center round the morphosyntactic behaviour of verbs meaning ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ crosslinguistically. Such verbs have sometimes been referred to in linguistic literature as “ingestive verbs”. This term appears to originate in Masica (1976), where it refers to “a small set of verbs... having in common a semantic feature of taking something into the body or mind (literally or figuratively)” (Masica 1976 :46). As much of this chapter will be dedicated to demonstrating, these verbs often show intransitive characteristics. Masica considers them to be “occupying a halfway station between intransitives and transitives, since the object in question can frequently be dispensed with in favor of concentration on the activity as such” (p. 48). He takes this observation to explain certain facts about the semantic behaviour of these verbs under causativisation in Hindi, cf. 4.3.4 below. Positing “ingestive verbs” as a linguistically relevant category presents a number of problems, however. These are succinctly summarised by Klaiman (1981a:140): “The problems are: first, whether a fixed class of verbs can or should be characterized by the semantic feature ‘ingestive’; second, whether the notion



Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

‘ingestive’ accurately account for the predicates it is intended to classify; and thirdly and most importantly, whether the ingestive verb hypothesis provides a basis for a correct grouping of verbs according to their surface behavior”. In other words, what exactly are the criteria for classifying a verb as “ingestive”, and does inclusion in this class entail any predictions about the formal behaviour of the verbs in question? From the current perspective, we can add a third problem: The notion of “ingestivity” does not in itself appear to account for the fact that these verbs show a crosslinguistic tendency to pattern differently from prototypical transitives. Masica’s observation that “the object in question can frequently be dispensed with in favor of concentration on the activity as such” is hardly an explanation, since there is no principled reason why “concentration on the activity as such” should not be possible with non-ingestive verbs. Klaiman’s alternative analysis in terms of a distinction between “affective” and “effective” verbs – verbs describing actions which primarily affect the subject vs. verbs describing actions which primarily affect some other entity – is taken up by Saksena (1980, 1982), who uses the term “affected agent” to account for alternations in causee case-marking in Hindi causative constructions; the data in question will be presented in 4.3.4 below. In Saksena’s terms, affected agents are “the recipients of the verb activity and constitute the target toward which this activity is directed” (Saksena 1982 :61). A number of linguists have noted that acts of eating and drinking are characterised by affecting their agent. For example, Starosta (1978) characterises intransitive uses of ‘eat’ (John is eating) as having a “Patient” subject, by which he presumably means that the subject argument is affected by the act of eating. Wierzbicka (1982) accounts for constructions of the type have a drink essentially by arguing that they describe actions undertaken by an agent for the sole purpose of achieving an effect on himself. Nedjalkov and Jaxontov (1988) include “verbs meaning ‘to eat’, ‘to drink’” in the class of verbs forming “possessive resultative constructions”, which apply in cases where “the result of the action affects the underlying subject rather than the immediate patient of the action” (Nedjalkov and Jaxontov 1988 :9). Haspelmath (1994) similarly notes that verbs whose agent argument is “saliently affected” may form “active resultative participles”, meaning that the resultative participles describe an effect achieved on the agent rather than the patient argument. Among such affected-agent verbs Haspelmath counts ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ as well as ‘learn’, ‘see’, ‘put on’ and ‘wear’ (Haspelmath 1994 :161). Eating, then is a typical example of an act which affects its agent. The A participant of an act of eating conforms to the specifications of an agent in that it volitionally instigates the event, but has the additional property of being itself affected by the event. In terms of the feature specifications presented in the previous



Prototypical Transitivity

chapter, such participant can be characterised as [+VOL, +INST, +AFF]. We will refer to participants with this feature specification as Affected Agents. By the definition in Table 1, clauses with Affected Agents deviate from the semantic transitive prototype, and so we would expect to find languages in which such clauses are formally distinct from clauses with prototypical transitive verbs – that is, with unaffected Agents. As noted by Masica, this is in fact fairly common for verb meaning ‘eat’, which show a wide variety of “intransitive” characteristics crosslinguistically. We will now examine some ways in which clauses with verbs meaning ‘eat’ deviate from the prototypical transitive construction across languages. We will also see that constructions with ‘eat’ often pattern in similar ways as other types of constructions characterised by the affectedness of the A participant.

4.3 Crosslinguistic data 4.3.1 Indefinite object deletion and suppletive verb pairs The best-known and most frequently-discussed case of “intransitive behaviour” in ‘eat’ verbs is that of so-called indefinite object deletion (IOD), found in English and a large number of other languages. In these languages, ‘eat’ verbs exhibit a structurally fairly simple alternation: they can be used either with or without an overt direct object, without any further morphosyntactic differences in the verb or the clause. (4.1) English (Indo-European, Germanic): a. He is eating the apple/an apple/apples. b. He is eating. (4.2) Amele (Trans-New Guinea, Madang; Roberts 1987 :68): a. Uqa sab je-i-a 3sg food eat-3sg-past ‘He ate food.’ b. Uqa je-i-a 3sg eat-3sg-past ‘He ate.’

In clauses like (4.1b) and (4.2b) the “missing object” is necessarily interpreted as indefinite, hence the term “indefinite object deletion” – as Fillmore (1986) points out, exchanges such as What happened to my sandwich? *Fido ate are impossible in English. The phenomenon of indefinite object deletion will be examined in more detail in chapter 6.



Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

Of course, ‘eat’ is rarely the only verb in a language to participate in this alternation. Also, there are languages in which any transitive verb may occur without an overt object, and in such languages there is clearly nothing unusual about the behaviour of ‘eat’ in this regard. However, for English and many other languages, indefinite object deletion only applies to a small subset of verbs, which as a result are frequently labelled “pseudo-intransitive”, “labile”, or “(S/A) ambitransitive” (cf. chapter 6). Most transitive verbs in English do not allow their object to be left unexpressed whether it is indefinite or not (though conditions which facilitate object omission will be discussed in chapter 6): one can say He is breaking the bottle/a bottle/bottles but not *He is breaking (on an agentive reading of He); He is killing the ant/an ant/ants but not *He is killing. Not all of the verbs showing this alternation in English are verbs of ingestion, but eat nevertheless differs from most other transitive verbs in English in allowing it. Indefinite object deletion with verbs meaning ‘eat’ is extremely common crosslinguistically, found in a wide range of languages such as Turkish (Altaic), Malayalam (Dravidian), Hebrew (Afro-Asiatic), Machiguenga (Arawakan), Bāgandji (Pama-Nyungan) and Imonda (Trans-New Guinea), to name but a few. A phenomenon which in a sense is similar to that of indefinite object deletion is the occurrence of suppletive verb pairs for transitive and intransitive uses of ‘eat’. In the case of object deletion, the same verbal lexeme has both transitive and intransitive uses; with suppletion there are two different forms corresponding to the two different uses. The same applies to suppletive verb pairs as to indefinite object deletion: They are not particularly common with semantically transitive verbs in general, but occur quite frequently with verbs meaning ‘eat’. A few examples are the Godoberi (Nakh-Daghestanian) forms ami ‘eat TR’ vs. ik�ã ‘eat INTR’ (Kibrik 1996 :117); Chamorro (Austronesian) kanno’ ‘eat TR’ vs. chocho ‘eat INTR’ (Topping 1973 :78–79), and Mosetén (Mosetenan) jeb- ‘eat TR’ vs. saeksi- ‘eat INTR’ (Sakel 2003 :143, 149). That verbs with Affected Agents should appear in formally intransitive constructions is predicted by the definition of prototypical transitivity discussed in chapter 2. However, the notion of affectedness of the agent also provides a more specific perspective on the frequent occurrence of indefinite object deletion with these verbs, a phenomenon which has been subject to much discussion (e.g. Fillmore 1986, Rice 1988, Goldberg 2001). An affected argument is described by Tenny (1994) as “one that makes the event described by the verb delimited, by undergoing a change of state that marks the temporal end of the event”. As a result of this, affected arguments are “measuring arguments”, an argument type which “measures out and imposes delimitedness on the event” (Tenny 1994 :158). In other words, affectedness is a property which defines the perceived endpoint of a verbal event; the perceived affectedness



Prototypical Transitivity

of one of the participants involved marks the natural outcome or result of an action, and therefore its natural endpoint. Similar statements are found e.g. in Kemmer (1993 :50–51), where the prototypical “Endpoint” of an event is taken to be a Patient which is “directly and completely affected by the event”, and Croft (1994 :94), where it is stated that “a clearly and fully affected patient, one that changes into a stable result state by virtue of the action, is easily construed as the endpoint of a self-contained event”. This view of affectedness has interesting implications for the notion of Affected Agent: If affected arguments “measure out” events, then the agent of a verb like ‘eat’, by virtue of being affected, might function as an argument serving to delimit the verbal action. In other words, an Affected Agent is, or can be construed as, the endpoint of the act of eating. This would imply that events which involve both an Affected Agent and an affected Patient argument may in fact have two potential endpoints: one defined by the effect achieved on the Patient, another defined by the effect achieved on the agent. This assumption indeed corresponds perfectly to the behaviour exhibited by English eat in transitive and intransitive constructions, respectively: in the clause John ate the apple, the event is delimited by the effect on the Patient argument, the apple, and is concluded when the apple is completely consumed. However, in intransitive clauses of the type John ate (in ten minutes) or John has eaten, the event of eating is delimited by the effect on John: the endpoint of the act of eating has been reached when John is full, that is, when he has achieved the desired effect on himself. It is essential to note that it is this effect, rather than that on the patient, which is the main goal of the agent’s act: we eat in order to achieve an effect on ourselves, not primarily on the food. In Tenny’s model, an event cannot show more than one instance of “measuring out” by an argument, and only internal arguments can measure out events. Facts such as those just discussed, however, suggest that it is in fact possible for an event to have two potentially measuring arguments, although only one of them may function as an actual measuring argument in any given clause. Furthermore, they suggest that the restriction on which arguments may be measuring arguments is not a formal restriction in terms of internal vs. external arguments, but rather a semantic restriction in terms of affectedness: any affected argument has the potential of serving to measure out an event. Support for this proposal is found in the fact that Tenny’s analysis meets with difficulties just at the point where, under the affected-agent analysis, two affected arguments of a single event are involved: the case of ‘eat’. She treats this verb under the heading of “Unspecified NP deletion” and states that “whereas a direct argu1.

Intransitively used eat may also have nondelimited readings; see 4.5 below.



Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

ment may specify that Brian ate a meal or a peppercorn, using the verb without a direct argument can only mean that Brian ate a meal” (Tenny 1994 :44). A few lines later, however, she says that “[unspecified NP deletion] shifts the interpretation of the sentence to a non-delimited reading because it removes the measuring argument through which the event is delimited”. But if ‘Brian ate’ without an overt object has the specific meaning that ‘Brian ate a meal’, then surely this is also a delimited reading; eating a meal is a delimited event just as eating an apple is. This leads to a contradiction: if ‘Brian ate a meal’ denotes a delimited event because the overt object argument ‘a meal’ is a measuring argument which determines the endpoint of the event, and if the only possible reading of ‘Brian ate’ is ‘Brian ate a meal’, then the objectless sentence cannot at the same time denote a non-delimited event. In other words, Tenny’s analysis, allowing only one possible measuring argument per event, breaks down at exactly the point where an event, according to the current analysis, has two affected participants. If Affected Agent arguments may function as measuring arguments, this provides a fairly straightforward explanation for the frequent occurrence of ‘eat’ in two alternative syntactic contexts, either with or without an overt direct object. The choice of which argument should be taken to measure out an event such as that of eating is in reality a question of perspective. Either one may choose to focus on the objectively most affected participant in the event, the Patient, whose affectedness is immediately observable to any objective bystander. Or else one may focus on the most salient effect from the agent’s point of view, namely the effect that the agent registers directly on himself and which constitutes his motivation for engaging in the act of eating. If one wishes to focus on the effect on the agent, then this effect can be construed as measuring out the event. On such a construal, the agent is cast as the endpoint of the event, and the event is completely described once the agent has been specified – both the initiating entity and the endpoint of the action are included in the description of the event, since they are both the same entity. When the event is construed in this way, reference to the patient is simply superfluous, since the event already has a delimiting argument. In Kemmer’s terms, the Initiator and the entity which is being cast as the Endpoint are the same physical entity; hence there is no distinguishability of participants, and the event is encoded as formally intransitive. 4.3.2 Labile verbs The notion of indefinite object deletion is most readily applicable to languages with accusatively aligned morphosyntax, since in these the notion of “object” is fairly unproblematic. However, even in a number of languages with ergative characteris-



Prototypical Transitivity

tics – that is, where S and O are categorised together as opposed to A for the purposes of case-marking, verb agreement or other morphological or syntactic processes – the verb ‘eat’ shows interesting properties with respect to argument ellipsis. In Samoan, which has an ergative case-marking system, the verb ‘ai ‘eat’ is a so-called labile verb (Mosel and Hovdhaugen 1992 :108). All transitive verbs in Samoan may be used with only one overt argument (Mosel 1991a argues that ergative constructions in Samoan are not “cardinal transitive constructions”, because the ergative-marked argument is always omissible); the only obligatory argument for any verb is the morphologically unmarked absolutive phrase. Even with verbs which are highly transitive semantically, the ergative phrase, referring to the agent, may always be left out, and in fact is only used when one wishes to draw special attention to the agent. Thus any verb phrase including an absolutive argument constitutes a complete, grammatical clause, and with most two-participant verbs, this absolutive argument refers to the patient: (4.3) Samoan (Austronesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian; Mosel and Hovdhaugen 1992 :100): Sā sasa le tama past hit art child ‘The child was hit (or: Someone hit the child).’

Importantly, the single argument in (4.3) can only be interpreted as the patient; it is not possible to interpret this sentence as having an overt agent but no patient, that is, as meaning ‘The child hit someone’. However, the class of “labile verbs”, of which ‘ai ‘eat’ is a core member, behaves somewhat differently. Like other two-participant verbs, they require an absolutive phrase and allow an additional ergative argument, which when present will always refer to the agent participant. But the labile verbs, when used without an ergative phrase, allow the interpretation which (4.3) lacks: (4.4)

Samoan (Mosel and Hovdhaugen 1992 :108): Sā ‘ai le teine past eat art girl ‘The girl ate.’

Since the absolutive phrase may be interpreted as the agent, these verbs allow for an additional locative-directional noun phrase denoting a partially affected object: Sā ‘ai le teine i le i’a ‘The girl ate some fish (ate at the fish)’. It is this possibility of taking

2. Even the absolutive phrase is omissible if it is retrievable from context: ‘Ua fasi (perf hit) ‘A person (whose identity is understood by the context) was hit’ (Mosel 1991b:249).



Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

either an ergative-absolutive or an absolutive-oblique case-frame that is the basis for the classification of these verbs as “labile” in Mosel and Hovdhaugen (1992). However, as indicated above, there is another sense in which ‘ai and similar verbs distinguish themselves from the so-called ergative verbs exemplified in (4.3), namely the possibility of an agentive reading for the absolutive phrase when no other arguments are present. Sentence (4.4) is in fact ambiguous and might in an appropriate context equally well be read as ‘The girl was eaten’; so these verbs might be said to be “labile” in that they allow for two different readings of the absolutive phrase. If (4.4) is constructed with an absolutive and an ergative phrase, the ergative is unambiguously the agent and the absolutive the patient: (4.5)

Samoan (Mosel and Hovdhaugen 1992 :108): Sā ‘ai e le teine le i’a past eat erg art girl art fish ‘The girl ate the fish (*The fish ate the girl).’

The meaning of (4.5) is no different from what would arise with a verbs such as sasa ‘hit’ in (4.5). The labile verbs, however, are the only verbs which allow the absolutive-as-agent reading in the intransitive construction; with regular transitive verbs without an overt ergative phrase, there is no way of interpreting the absolutive as anything other than a patient. Sentence (4.4) is the exact semantic equivalent of the English objectless clause The girl ate. It employs much the same mechanisms: the patient argument is omitted, and the agent is cast in the unmarked case, which in Samoan is the absolutive rather than the nominative as in English. But this encoding of a (transitive) agent in the absolutive is highly unusual in Samoan and is only found with ‘eat’ and a handful of other verbs. In fact, the class of labile verbs seems to a large extent to be defined by the presence of an affected A argument. Examples of such verbs listed in Mosel and Hovdhaugen (1992) include fa’amalosi which with a single absolutive argument means ‘force oneself, keep going’, while used with an ergative phrase it means ‘force someone’; fa’apelepele which without an ergative means ‘love very much’, with an ergative ‘spoil a child’; su’esu’e meaning ‘study’ in the non-ergative construction and ‘examine’ in the ergative, and va’ai meaning ‘see’ in the non-ergative and ‘see, look after, visit’ in the ergative use. Many of these are verbs of experience, which share with ‘ai ‘eat’ the property of having an affected A argument, on the generally accepted analysis that receiving a sensory or cognitive impression constitutes a type of affectedness (see 5.3.1 and chapter 8). In all these verb pairs (for more examples see Mosel and Hovdhaugen 1992 :109– 111), the version without an ergative focuses on the effect of the action on the agent, while the ergative construction adds an affected patient. A particularly striking example is the verb fa’apelepele, where the ergative meaning ‘spoil a child’ succinctly

 Prototypical Transitivity

describes whan happens to an object exposed to the effects of the non-ergative meaning, ‘love very much’, which in itself mainly affects the person who loves. Mosel and Hovdhaugen (1992) describe the semantics of labile verbs by saying that “in [the] ergative constructions the semantic relationship between the verb phrase and the absolutive phrase [...] is a relationship of affectedness”, but when these verbs are used non-ergatively, “the semantic relationship between the verb phrase and the absolutive noun phrase is of a different nature” (Mosel and Hovdhaugen 1992 :108). This is obviously a misinterpretation. The semantic relationship between the verb phrase and the absolutive noun phrase is in fact essentially the same in both instances, and indeed one of affectedness; the only difference is that in the non-ergative use the absolutive codes an affected agent, while in the ergative use, it codes a patient. The absolutive case can be used for either of these, under the appropriate circumstances, but not for unaffected agents. A pattern somewhat similar to that of the Samoan labile verbs is found in Greenlandic, which is also ergative, but which unlike Samoan is head-marking and polysynthetic. Usually, in Greenlandic, “at least in the older language” (Sadock 1980), if a transitive verb is used with only one argument present it has a “passivelike interpretation”, i.e. the argument is interpreted as the patient, and the verb agrees with this patientive argument: (4.6) Greenlandic (Eskimo-Aleut, Eskimo; Sadock 1980 :305): a. Piniartoq toquppaa hunter.abs kill.ind.3sg/3sg ‘He killed the hunter.’ b. Piniartoq toquppoq hunter.abs kill.ind.3sg ‘The hunter was killed.’

However, some verbs, among them ‘eat’, can be used intransitively agreeing with the agent; in such cases an oblique object may optionally be present, but is not cross-referenced on the verb. (4.7) Greenlandic (Sadock 1980 :305): a. Neqi nerivara meat.abs eat.ind.1sg/3sg ‘I ate the meat.’ b. (Neqi-mik) nerivunga meat-ins eat.ind.1sg ‘I ate (meat).’

A similar pattern is found in the related language Yup’ik (Mithun 2000).



Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

In these languages, then, the verb ‘eat’ may be used in intransitive constructions with its single argument referring to the agent, whereas normally in such intransitive uses of basically two-place verbs, the single argument of the intransitive is interpreted as referring to the patient. As with the cases of indefinite object deletion discussed in 4.3.1, this can be understood in terms of the parameter of affectedness; casting an Affected Agent as the single argument of an intransitive construction highlights the effect of the action on the agentive participant, and backgrounds that on the Patient. In Kemmer’s terms, the “Initiator” is also an “Endpoint” – an affected participant – and it is this fact which is highlighted by the use of an intransitive construction, where the other potential Endpoint of the event is demoted or suppressed. 4.3.3 Cross-referencing properties There are other languages where the verb ‘eat’ does not only have an intransitive use, but also, when used intransitively, shows properties differing from those of other intransitive verbs. In the Keresan language of New Mexico, USA, transitive verbs take a subject-number suffix and an object-number prefix. In intransitive constructions, some verbs have the number of their subject indicated by suffixes (similarly to transitive subjects) while others have subject number indicated by prefixes (patterning like transitive objects). Most transitive verbs, when used intransitively, take subject-number suffixes, and so indicate the number of an intransitive subject in the same way as that of a transitive subject. This is the case for verbs such as ‘cut’, ‘kill’, ‘break’, and ‘steal’. Another set of verbs, however, including ‘eat’ and ‘drink’, take subject-number prefixes, thus treating their intransitive subjects in the same way as a transitive object: /č -up E/ ‘he eats’ (Maring 1967 :85). A similar, though more complex, situation is found in the Mayan language Yukatek of Mexico. To begin with, it should be noted that Yukatek has no underived transitive verb meaning ‘eat’; han ‘eat’ is intransitive, and can only be used with a direct object if transitivised with an overt transitivising suffix (Jürgen Bohnemeyer p.c.). Cross-referencing of intransitive subjects in Yukatek depends on the verb’s aspect. Intransitive verbs in the imperfective aspect take the same subject clitics which cross-reference the subjects of transitive verbs. In the perfective aspect, however, intransitive subjects are cross-referenced by a set of suffixes which are used to refer to the objects of transitive verbs. Yukatek shows two formal classes of intransitive verbs: one which is unmarked for imperfective aspect, that is, which takes no overt imperfective-aspect marker but does take a marker for perfective aspect; and one which is unmarked for per-



Prototypical Transitivity

fective aspect, showing overt aspect marking for imperfective aspect only. These two classes are labelled “inherently imperfective” and “inherently perfective”, respectively (Krämer and Wunderlich 1999). In general, the class of inherently imperfective verbs, which take the transitive subject cross-referencing marker in their unmarked aspect, consists of “activity verbs” – verbs such as ‘work’, ‘run’, ‘bathe’ and ‘dance’ belong to this class. The class of inherently perfective verbs, which in their unmarked aspect show the marker otherwise used to cross-reference transitive objects, consists mainly of “change-ofstate” verbs such as ‘arrive’, ‘awaken’, ‘die’ and ‘fall’. Han ‘eat’, however, despite being considered an activity verb by Krämer and Wunderlich (1999 :447) belongs to the inherently perfective class. In other words, when it is unmarked for aspect, it takes the subject cross-referencing marker which with transitive verbs is used for objects. Its semantics is not the only thing that sets han ‘eat’ apart from the rest of the verbs of its formal class. All intransitive verbs in Yukatek can be transitivised by affixation. In general, the verbs of the inherently perfective class transitivise by causativisation: the causative suffix -s is added to the verb, which then takes an additional agentive argument, while the subject of the intransitive becomes the object of the derived transitive. The exception to this pattern is han ‘eat’, which instead of transitivising by causativisation, rather takes the applicative suffix normally used to transitivise the inherently imperfective verbs, and adds an object rather than a subject argument: (4.8) Yukatek (Mayan; Krämer and Wunderlich 1999 :447): a. K=a hàan-al incompl=2 eat-ipfv ‘You are eating.’ b. K=a háan-t-ik incompl=2 eat-appl-ipfv ‘You are eating it.’

‘Eat’ in Yukatek, then, patterns with a formal class containing mostly change-ofstate verbs with respect to its aspectual behaviour, and in the unmarked case takes a subject marker corresponding to that marking objects of transitive verbs; but it shows derivational properties similar to those of the other class in that it adds an object rather than a causative agent when transitivised. The analysis of ‘eat’ as having an Affected Agent argument accounts for these facts in a fairly straightforward manner. In Keresan, the subject argument of intransitive ‘eat’ is encoded in the same way as object arguments of transitive verbs; these two types of arguments share the property of being affected. Furthermore,



Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

we suggested above that the intransitive use of ‘eat’ in itself highlights the effect of the act on the agent, so that the agent is construed as the “endpoint” of the event; thus they are encoded in the same way as the “endpoints” of transitive verbs, which is the object. The classification of ‘eat’ as an “inherently perfective” verb in Yukatek can similarly be understood as a consequence of the verb’s having an Affected Agent argument. Recall that the “inherently imperfective” class, which is unmarked for imperfective aspect, and whose unmarked forms take a subject cross-referencing marker corresponding to that of transitive subjects, consists mainly of “activity verbs”, while the “inherently perfective” class, which is unmarked for perfective aspect and whose subject cross-referencing marker corresponds to the marker of transitive objects, consists mainly of “change-of-state” verbs. “Undergoing a change of state” is the generally accepted definition of affectedness. Thus, if we reinterpret the inherently perfective class as containing verbs whose subject arguments are affected by the verbal action, it is only to be expected that intransitive ‘eat’ should fall into this class. The fact that the verbs of this class in their unmarked form take the subject cross-referencing marker which is also used for transitive objects further supports this analysis, if we take the marker to refer to affected arguments. The fact that just ‘eat’, out of all the verbs in the inherently perfective class, takes an applicative rather than a causative morpheme in transitivisation, is a logical consequence of these facts. The inherently perfective class contains verbs whose subject argument is affected. In nearly all cases, such as with ‘fall’ or ‘die’, these arguments are semantically patients. In other words, when these verbs are transitivised, the argument added by the transitivisation process is an agent, which brings about the effect registered on the patient argument – the process known as causativisation. The subject of ‘eat’, however, is not a patient but an affected agent, and so it is possible to transitivise this verb by adding a patient, by means of the morpheme generally used for this purpose, the applicative affix. Adding a causative agent would in principle be possible, but would yield a different meaning – ‘make x eat’ rather than ‘eat x’. 4.3.4 Causativisation Yukatek is by no means the only language where the process of causativisation functions differently with respect to ‘eat’ than for other verbs. Amberber (2002) notes that in a number of languages, causative morphemes or constructions which in general are restricted to occurring on intransitive verbs exceptionally occur on just one small class of transitives: the ingestive verbs. A number of languages, including for example Amharic (Afro-Asiatic, Ethiopia), Palauan (Austronesian, Palau/Guam), Kolami (Dravidian, India), Sinhala



Prototypical Transitivity

(Indo-European, Sri Lanka), and Maricopa (Hokan, USA) have morphological causatives which only apply to intransitive verbs. However, in all of these languages there is a small group of verbs that are exceptional in that they allow the “intransitive” causative affix despite being formally transitive. In Amharic, this group includes verbs such as bәlla ‘eat’, t’әt’t’a ‘drink’, lasә ‘lick’, wat’ә ‘swallow’ and gat’ә ‘graze’ (Amberber 2002); in Palauan, the “most common” examples are mçenga ‘eat’, mçehim ‘drink’ and mçelamçech ‘chew, smoke’ (Josephs 1975 :206–7); in Kolami, the only example quoted in my source is tin- ‘eat’ (Emeneau 1961 :70); in Sinhala, the set includes kanәwa ‘eat’, bonәwa ‘drink’ and dannәwa ‘know’ (Gair 1970 :67), while in Maricopa the verbs are maa-m ‘eat’, sii-m ‘drink’, soo-k ‘eat (meat)’, yuu-k ‘see’ and ‘ii-m ‘say’ (Gordon 1986 :89). For more examples see Amberber (2002) and Dixon (2000). Dixon concludes that “if a morphological causative is used with only a few transitive verbs, these are likely to include ‘drink’ and ‘eat’” (Dixon 2000 :56). In all the languages mentioned above, ‘eat’ and similar verbs, although formally transitive, function in the same way as intransitives for the purposes of causativisation. Note that it is not the case that these languages causativise ‘eat’ only when it is used intransitively. Rather, unlike other transitive verbs in these languages, ‘eat’ and similar verbs may form causatives on the basis of a formally transitive clause. (4.9) Sinhala (Indo-European, Indic; Gair 1970 :67): a. Gonaa piduru kanәwa b. Lamea gonaa.tә piduru kawәnәwa bull straw eat.npt.act boy bull.dat straw feed.npt.act ‘The bull eats straw.’ ‘The boy feeds the bull straw.’

Other transitive verbs in Sinhala may be causativised, but their causee arguments, if expressed, are encoded differently: they are marked either with the postposition lawaa or with the dative case plus postposition kiyәla: (4.10)

Sinhala (Gair and Paolillo 1997 :40): Mamә gunәpaalә lawaa/gunәpaalәtә kiyәla gas kæppuna I Gunapala lawaa/Gunapala.dat kiyәla trees cut.caus.past ‘I got Gunapala to cut the trees.’

A similar pattern is found in Berber, with the difference that here causativisation of transitive verbs is excluded altogether, the only exception being ttc ‘eat’ and a



Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

few other verbs referring to ingestion and the results of ingestion, including sw ‘drink’, jjawn ‘be satiated with food’, and tted ‘suckle’: (4.11) Berber (Afro-Asiatic, Berber; Guerssel 1986 cited in Amberber 2002 :6): a. Y-ttcu wqqzin aysum 3m.sg-eat dog:cst meat ‘The dog ate the meat.’ b. Y-ss-ttc wryaz aysum i-wqqzin 3m.sg-caus-eat:pfv man:cst meat dat-dog:cst ‘The man fed meat to the dog.’ c. *Y-ss-wt wmddakkwl-inw mucc aryaz 3m.sg-caus-hit friend:cst-my cat man ‘My friend made the man hit the cat.’

As mentioned briefly in the introduction, Saksena (1982) analyses the difference between the two causatives in Hindi in terms of the notion of affected agent. Hindi has a very elaborate and productive system of causativisation, with two different causative suffixes, -aa and -vaa – traditionally termed the “first” and “second” causative. They apply to both transitive and intransitive verbs, and verbs generally accept either suffix; the resulting forms often, but not always, show a difference in meaning corresponding to that between “direct” or “contactive” causation on the one hand (-aa) and “indirect” or “noncontactive” causation on the other (-vaa). Thus from pa.rh ‘read’ can be derived pa.rh-aa ‘study’ and pa.rh-vaa ‘have (someone) study’. When verbs are causativised, the causee – the subject of the original noncausative verb – can take one of two case-markers: either the “dative-accusative” suffix –koo, which is the case-marker for prototypical patient objects, or the “instrumental” suffix –see. (4.12) Hindi (Indo-European, Indic; Saksena 1982 :41–42): a. Raam-nee khaanaa khaa-yaa Ram-erg food eat-past ‘Ram ate dinner.’ b. Mai-nee raam-koo/*see khaanaa khil-aa-yaa I-erg Ram-dat/acc (*ins) food eat-caus-past ‘I fed Ram.’

3. In fact, the distribution of –koo in noncausative clauses in Hindi is a rather complex matter, depending among other things on the definiteness and animacy of the object in question, cf 7.2. For the present purposes, though, it is appropriate to say that –koo marks patient objects – although not all patient objects.



Prototypical Transitivity

c. Raam-nee pee.r kaa.t-aa Ram-erg tree cut-past ‘Ram cut the tree.’ d. Mai-nee raam-see/*koo peer kaa.t-aa-yaa I-erg Ram-ins (*dat/acc) tree cut-caus-past ‘I made Ram cut the tree.’

In the clauses in (4.12), causee case-marking is exclusively determined by the verb of the clause; (4.12b) and (d) are ungrammatical if their causee case-markers are changed. A small group of verbs, however, allow either case-marker: (4.13)

Hindi (Saksena 1982 :49): Mai-nee raam-koo/-see masaalaa cakh-vaa-yaa I-erg Ram-dat/acc/-ins spicing taste-caus-past ‘I had Ram taste the seasoning.’

The difference between dative-accusative and instrumental causee case-marking furthermore corresponds to a difference in the semantics of the different causative constructions. If the causee is marked by –koo, then causativisation with the –aa suffix results in a direct/contactive causation interpretation; but when the causee takes –see, this suffix is interpreted as referring to a situation of indirect/noncontactive causation. The suffix –vaa, however, yields an indirect, noncontactive causation reading in all cases, and so it is only in constructions with –koo-marked causees that there is a possible contrast between direct and indirect causation. Saksena argues that the crucial distinction between verbs that take –koo and verbs that take -see on their causee argument when causativised lies in whether or not this argument is an affected agent of the original noncausative verb. The examples with –koo above involved the verbs ‘eat’ and ‘taste’, both of which can be plausibly analysed as having Affected Agent arguments. According to Saksena, when such verbs are causativised the affected agent in the role of causee will take dative/ accusative case marking – the marking also found on patients of transitive verbs – because it shares with the prototypical patient the property of being affected. A non-affected agent, on the other hand, will take instrumental case marking when it is a causee. Thus in I fed Ram in (4.12b), Ram will have dative/accusative case marking because he is an affected agent. In I had Ram cut the tree (4.12d), on the other hand, Ram is not an affected agent and so will rather take instrumental case marking. With verbs that may take either case-marking, the result is a semantic distinction: with dative/accusative –koo, the causative construction focuses on the effects of the action on the causee, while with instrumental –see, it focuses on the effects on the patient that the causee acts upon. Thus, in (4.13), “when the causee agent (...) is marked by –koo, the goal is to get the causee to taste the seasonings,



Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

but when this agent is marked by –see, the goal is to get the seasonings tasted (e.g. to see if they need correcting) and the causee is a means towards this end” (Saksena 1982 :92). Similarly, the fact that only the constructions with –koo-marked causees show a distinction between direct/contactive and indirect/contactive causation is explained in terms of the affectedness of the causee agent. Saksena states the conditions for contactive causation as follows: “in order for causative contact to be initiated, the causer must be personally involved in the verb activity; and in order for causative contact to be completed, the causee must be the target of the activity” (Saksena 1982 :85). She argues that the causative suffix –aa signals a personally involved causer, while the suffix –vaa signals a noninvolved causer. In other words, only the –aa causative fulfills the first condition for contactive causation. The second condition, that the causee be the target of the activity, is fulfilled only by affected causees – those which are marked by –koo in Hindi. Therefore, only the combination of suffix –aa and causee case-marker –koo fulfills both conditions and gives rise to a contactive causation reading; in all other instances, one or both conditions is violated, and the only possible reading is one of noncontactive causation. It is tempting to suggest a unified analysis of the two phenomena discussed in this section – the causativisability of two-argument affected-agent verbs in languages which otherwise allow causatives only of transitives, and the case alternation on causee arguments in Hindi causatives – in terms of the semantic notion of affectedness. Such an analysis would imply that the restriction on causativisation in languages where only intransitives plus a handful of “anomalous” transitives may be causativised is not in fact a formal syntactic restriction, but rather a restriction on the semantic properties of the causee: in order to be cast as the causee of a causative construction, the subject of the original noncausative verb must be affected. Such an analysis would mean that all intransitive subjects would have to be characterised as affected, assuming that all intransitives can in principle be causativised in the languages in question; this position is argued for by Saksena (1982 :62) and advanced in work by a number of other linguists (e.g. Jackendoff 1972, Starosta 1978, Blake 1982). In this regard, it is interesting to note that among Athapaskan languages, there are some which restrict the use of the causative affix to intransitive verbs with “patientive subjects” (Rice 2000 :200), while others also allow it on agentive intransitives. At the same time, many Athapaskan languages restrict causativisation of transitives to a very few verbs, typically ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ (Rice 2000 :210). 4. In other words, the causee here functions as a kind of “instrument” through which the act of tasting is achieved, and so the use of the instrumental case is unsurprising – see the discussion of dative vs. instrumental case on causee arguments in 8.4.3.



Prototypical Transitivity

To substantiate such an hypothesis, one would have to carry out a detailed examination of exactly which transitive verbs, besides ‘eat’ and ‘drink’, can be causativised in languages which restrict causativisation of transitives to “just a few verbs”. Undertaking such an examination is beyond the scope of this study; I will simply note here the possibility that the notion of Affected Agent may have some light to shed on restrictions on causative constructions crosslinguistically. 4.3.5 Case-marking properties In a number of languages, the arguments of ‘eat’ show case-marking properties which deviate from those found with most other two-participant verbs. In the Brazilian language Trumai (isolate), for instance, the verb ‘eat’, as well as a number of other verbs including verbs of perception and mental activity, takes an oblique (dative) rather than a direct object (Guirardello 1999 :352): (4.14)

Trumai (isolate; Raquel Guirardello p.c.): Ha-ø ma-tke t’ak-e-s 1-abs eat-des manioc.bread-epenth-dat ‘I want to eat manioc bread.’

Another language of Brazil, Bororo, similarly marks the object of ‘eat’ with an oblique marker generally used for nonaffected participants such as the O argument of verbs of perception and speech, “range” arguments of verbs of motion (‘walk along the road’) etc., but not on affected objects of core transitive verbs: (4.15) Bororo (Macro-Gê, Bororo; Crowell 1979 :23, 29–30) a. E-re karo bowje 3pl-neutral fish 3sg.cut ‘They cut the fish.’ b. Imed jor d -re karo-ji man see-neutral fish-obl ‘The man saw the fish.’ c. Okoage-re karo-ji 3sg.eat-neutral fish-obl ‘He ate fish.’

5. In addition to okoage ‘eat’, which takes an oblique object, Bororo also has a fully transitive lexeme ko ‘eat’ (Crowell 1979:30).



Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

In Movima (unclassified, Bolivia), the object of kay ‘eat’ also requires an oblique marker: (4.16)

Movima (Haude 2006 :282) Jayna kay~kay ni-kia cho~cho -a=kis ney o’im dsc md~eat obl-art.pl.a red~br.nut-lv=art.pl.a here o’im ‘Then [the macaws] eat the nuts of those o’im trees.’

The reduplication glossed ‘middle’ on kay ‘eat’ is characteristic of a set of verbs labelled “middle verb roots”, which show middle-type semantics and formal characteristics of both monovalent and bivalent roots (Haude 2006 :345). In other words, ‘eat’ takes a morphological form typical of verbs whose semantics involve the affectedness of an initiating entity (cf. the discussion of middles in chapter 2; see also 4.6 below), and occurs in a formally intransitive syntactic frame, with an oblique second argument. As noted in the introduction, verbs taking an unmarked S argument plus an oblique O have sometimes been termed extended intransitive (Dixon 1994, Dixon and Aikhenvald 2000a). In Trumai, the class of extended-intransitive verbs includes, in addition to ‘eat’, a number of verbs that take experiencer subjects; in other words, ‘eat’ here again patterns with other verbs which have affected A arguments. This is also the case in Bororo where, as illustrated in example (4.15), experiencer verbs are encoded in the same way as affected-agent verbs, while transitive verbs with nonaffected agents take a different marking pattern. Patterns such as these can once again be taken to reflect the salience of the effect on the agent relative to that on the patient. The oblique marking of the patient argument of ‘eat’ can be understood as a strategy for marking the patient as peripheral to the event, and thus relatively low in distinctness: since the main effect of the act of eating – at least from the point of view of the agent – is on the agent rather than the patient, the patient is demoted to an oblique and the agent cast in the unmarked case. This resembles what happens under indefinite object deletion except that the patient argument is demoted rather than deleted altogether. In the Australian language Kalkatungu (Blake 1979), a.ri ‘eat, drink’ takes the standard transitive ergative-absolutive case-frame; but it very frequently occurs in a derived “antipassive” construction with absolutive-dative case-marking. According to Blake (1979 :28), this construction is used “where the reference is to an indefinite P or to indulgence in rather than completion of an activity”; it is obligatory when the verb takes the imperfective suffix and is very common with the habitual suffix.



Prototypical Transitivity

(4.17)

Kalkatungu (Australian, Pama-Nyungan; Blake 1979 :37): A.ri-li-mi -Ø maa-ci eat-antip-ipfv-I food-dat ‘I am eating tucker.’

However, the use of the antipassive with ‘eat’ in Kalkatungu extends beyond the circumstances specified above. Consider the following example: (4.18)

Kalkatungu (Blake 1979 :47): Ati-ntu u ai maanti- wakari meat-caus I sate-past fish-caus eat-antip-past ‘I’m full because I ate the fish.’

The translation here implies a definite object, and the verb is in the past tense, so these factors cannot be responsible for the use of the antipassive construction in this example. The explanation, rather, lies in the affected-agent semantics: sentence (4.18) is not mainly about the act of eating but about the effect of it on the agent, it describes what happens to the agent as a result of eating the fish. If we take this focusing on agent affectedness to be what triggers detransitivisation of the verb and the use of the absolutive-oblique case-frame, we can give a unified account of all the uses of this construction with ‘eat’ in Kalkatungu, on the assumption that using the verb to refer to “indulgence in rather than completion of an activity” similarly constitutes a focus on the effect the action produces on the agent rather than on the patient. A different and rather more complex example of oblique case-marking triggered by ‘eat’ is found in Newari (Tibeto-Burman, Givón 1985a). In Newari, any clause with a direct object, whether or not this object is referential, will take an ergative-marked subject. With modal verbs taking complement clauses, the casemarking of the subject depends on the transitivity of the embedded verb: the subject is ergative with a transitive complement clause, but dative with an intransitive: (4.19) Newari (Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman; Givón 1985a:93) a. Wō misa-na kap tajya-e mal-ą the woman-erg cup break-inf want-pfv ‘The woman wanted to break the cup.’ b. Wō misa-yata khusi ju-i mal-ą the woman-dat happy be-inf want-pfv ‘The woman wanted to be happy.’

‘Eat’ in this respect patterns with the intransitives, even with an overt object: the main-clause subject is dative:

(4.20)

Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

Newari (Givón 1985a:93): Wō misa-yata (ja) na-e mal-ą the woman-dat (rice) eat-inf want-pfv ‘The woman wanted to eat (rice).’

In all these languages, then, ‘eat’ occurs in formally intransitive constructions: in Trumai, Bororo, Movima and Kalkatungu with an oblique object, in Newari with oblique marking on the subject of a modal verb taking an ‘eat’ clause as complement – a marking which is normally found when the verb of the complement clause is intransitive. In the Tibeto-Burman language Chepang, objects are case-marked whenever they are considered to be “intentionally affected”, but take no case-markers when they are “only incidentally affected” or “not the prime target of the action” (Caughley 1982 :65). As an examples of such an object, Caughley (1982) provides a clause with ‘eat’: (4.21)

Chepang (Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman; Caughley 1982 :65): Ni-ci- i amh je -na- -c-u we-du-ag food eat-npt-1excl-du-ag ‘We two eat food.’

At first glance, it may seem strange to characterise the object of ‘eat’ as “only incidentally affected” or “not intentionally affected”. Something which is eaten is, after all, very much affected by the event, and the agent’s intention is, under normal circumstances, actively engaged in bringing this about. “Eating something unintentionally” can normally only be read as meaning that one chooses to eat something while unaware of certain characteristics of the object which would otherwise make one refrain from eating it, such as it belonging to someone else (I accidentally ate John’s sandwich instead of my own) or being poisonous or otherwise unhealthy (I accidentally ate some poisonous mushrooms along with the edible ones; see the Sinhala examples in (5.9) in chapter 5). It cannot, however, be taken to mean that the actual act of eating was unintentional, except perhaps in cases where the thing eaten literally flies into one’s mouth: I accidentally ate a bug. Intention, then, is an integral part of the semantics of ‘eat’, and one would therefore expect its object to be construed as “intentionally affected”. The notion of affected agent, however, explains why the object of ‘eat’ is marked as “only incidentally affected”. As has already been pointed out, the effect on the object is not what the agent’s intention is primarily engaged in achieving in the case of ‘eat’; we do not, under normal circumstances, eat in order to achieve an effect on the food, but in order to achieve an effect on ourselves. The agent’s main purpose for eating is to still his own hunger, not to make the food disappear; the food in itself is only a means for achieving a physical effect on oneself. In the words



Prototypical Transitivity

of Caughley, then, the object of ‘eat’ is indeed “not the prime target of the action”, and is “only incidentally affected” in the sense that the primary intended effect, the effect that the agent seeks to achieve through acting, is on the agent himself, not on the patient. The effect on the patient is indeed incidental from the agent’s point of view, a necessary side-effect of the process of achieving the intended effect. To summarise, verbs meaning ‘eat’ occur in a variety of formally intransitive constructions across a broad range of genetically and geographically diverse languages. On the analysis that such verbs are characterised semantically by having an Affected Agent argument, the intransitive behaviour of such verbs is exactly what would be predicted from the Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis: a clause with an Affected Agent as well as a Patient argument has two affected arguments, meaning that the semantic distinction between the arguments is less clear than in a clause with an unaffected Agent and a Patient. This lack of a clear semantic distinction is reflected in the encoding of these clauses as formally intransitive; that is, as having a single prominent participant, whereas the second participant is cast as less prominent or suppressed altogether.

4.4 ‘Eat’ and markers of agent affectedness 4.4.1 Affected Agents and the meaning of ‘eat’ We have seen that the hypothesis that affectedness of the agent is an integral part of the semantics of verbs meaning ‘eat’ allows for an explanation of the intransitive behaviour of such verbs crosslinguistically, in terms of the Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis. There is, however, independent evidence for this semantic analysis of ‘eat’, which will be surveyed in this section. In a number of languages, there is a formal link between the verb ‘eat’ and various markers of agent or subject affectedness. The link may be of two types: either the verb ‘eat’ appears with a marker of agent affectedness, such as a reflexive, either obligatorily or in contexts where a literal reflexive meaning is clearly not intended. Alternatively, the verb ‘eat’ may itself be grammaticalised into a marker of agent affectedness. Both of these cases clearly indicate that “affectedness of the agent” is a crucial component of the meaning of ‘eat’. 4.4.2 ‘Eat’ and reflexive constructions In the Cushitic language Oromo, nyaat ‘eat’ and a few other verbs obligatorily include in their stem the “subject-reflexive” suffix –at, even though there is no corresponding form without –at from which they could be derived. In general, when



Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

applied to other verb stems, the affix “has a basic meaning of ‘affecting the subject’”, and is used to mean that the action “takes place on behalf of the subject, and very commonly that the subject is intimately connected with the object, as, for example, its owner” (Owens 1985 :170). ‘Eat’, however, behaves syntactically unlike other verbs with the subject-reflexive suffix, allowing passivisation and cooccurring with the reciprocal pronoun which otherwise is not compatible with the –at affix. This, combined with the fact that no underived lexeme for ‘eat’ exists, suggests that the subject-reflexive affix is treated as part of the verbal lexeme nyaat rather than as the product of morphological derivation. On the affected-agent analysis of ingestive verbs, it is not surprising that such verbs should obligatorily occur with the subject-reflexive suffix. The suffix essentially marks affectedness of the agent/subject. With most verbs, such affectedness is not inherent to the verb meaning, but arises in certain contexts such as with benefactives, reflexives, or the case where the subject owns the object and so is indirectly affected by anything that happens to it. With ‘eat’, however, affectedness of the agent is part of the verb’s lexical meaning, and so the subject-reflexive marker is obligatory with these verbs. In Oromo, then, nyaat ‘eat’ is encoded morphologically in the same way as other verbs are when they have affected agents; but as affectedness of the agent is an obligatory part of this verb’s lexical meaning, the subject-reflexive marker has been lexicalised as part of the lexeme itself. The Australian language Ngiyambaa (Pama-Nyungan) has a verbal affix –DHa-y which “indicates that an event occurs in association with eating or drinking” (Donaldson 1980 :175). The affix is used on a variety of different verb types; for instance, with verbs of position, it indicates that eating or drinking is taking place simultaneously with the position event. The thing eaten or drunk is optionally expressed in the locative case: (4.22)

Ngiyambaa (Australian, Pama-Nyungan; Donaldson 1980 :176): Wi:-dja-nhi=dju dhi ga: ga sit-eat-past=1nom meat.loc ‘I sat eating (my) meat.’

With active verbs, the affix indicates that the action is undertaken in order to eat or drink: biru:bi-dja-y ‘lean over to drink (at a water-hole)’, wirinj-dja-y ‘cook to eat’. With stative verbs, the affix indicates that the state in question results from eating or drinking: maga-dha-y ‘choke from eating’. The ‘eat or drink’ suffix is homophonous with another verbal affix denoting “reflexive focus” (Donaldson 1980 :177), indicating that “the event referred to by the verb is of particular interest to its subject or agent”. The ‘eat or drink’ suffix cannot cooccur with the “reflexive focus” suffix; nevertheless, Donaldson (1980 :179) assumes that they are two separate forms.



Prototypical Transitivity

However, under the affected-agent analysis of ingestive verbs, it seems fairly clear that these are in fact instances of one and the same suffix. The basic meaning of this suffix is the “reflexive focus” one, which denotes various kinds of affectedness of an agent participant. Since eating and drinking are perhaps the most central and basic of human activities that involve affectedness of the agent, the suffix has acquired a more specialised use meaning ‘act while eating/drinking’ or ‘act in order to eat/drink’ rather than just ‘act to achieve some unspecified effect on oneself ’. There is, however, only one suffix, and it marks affectedness of the agent. In another Australian language, Dyirbal, dyaŋgay ‘eat’ takes a reflexive suffix when used intransitively: (4.23) Dyirbal (Australian, Pama-Nyungan; Dixon 1972 :90; glosses from Comrie 1978 :358): a. Balam wudyu ba gul ya a- gu dya ga- u abs fruit m.erg man-erg eat-tns ‘The man eats fruit.’ b. Bayi yara dya gay-mari- u m.abs man eat-refl-tns ‘The man eats.’

Dixon (1972 :90) comments on these constructions: “Since people do not eat themselves, the unmarked interpretation [of b.] would be that it is a false reflexive, referring to the eating of a regular meal”. However, on the interpretation of the reflexive as a construction indicating that the agent acts in order to affect himself, there is nothing “false” about the use of the reflexive with affected-agent verbs such as ‘eat’. On the contrary, the fact that ‘eat’ takes reflexive marking just when the patient is omitted – that is, when the emphasis is on the affectedness of the agent – is just what one might expect in light of the affected-agent hypothesis. Another instance where a reflexive marker is frequently found with ‘eat’ is to express the meaning ‘stuff oneself, overeat’. In the Austronesian language Paamese of Vanuatu, the verb mutahi ‘overeat’ requires an object pronoun coreferent with the subject; in other words, it is obligatorily reflexive: (4.24)

Paamese (Austronesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian; Crowley 1982 :180): Amutah kail haulu a+mutahi kaile haulue 3pl.real.overeat 3pl much ‘They overate a lot.’

6. For typographical reasons, the lamino-palatal stop in this and other examples from Dyirbal and Yidiny is rendered as dy, following Comrie (1978).



Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

Similarly, in the Australian language Guugu Yimidhirr, budal ‘eat’ may be used with a reflexive suffix to mean ‘have a good feed, stuff oneself ’: (4.25) Guugu Yimidhirr (Australian, Pama-Nyungan; Haviland 1979 :129–130): a. Nyulu yarrga-a mayi buda-y 3sg.nom boy-erg food.abs eat-past ‘The boy ate the food.’ b. Nyulu yarraga gada-y mayi-wi buda-adhi 3sg.nom boy.abs come-past food-dat eat-refl.past ‘The boy came and had a good feed of food.’

A similar reading of ‘eat-reflexive’ as ‘have a feed’ is found in Diyari, another Australian language (Austin 1981), while the ‘overeat’ meaning is also found e.g. in the Norwegian reflexive construction for-spise seg ‘prefix-eat refl’. Again, in these languages, a reflexive construction is used when the emphasis is on the effect of the eating on the agent – overeating or stuffing oneself could be paraphrased as eating until the agent experiences discomfort. (4.24) and (4.25b), then, describe a specific effect on the agent resulting from his own act, which again corresponds to the general meaning of the reflexive construction. 4.4.3 ‘Eat’ grammaticalised as marker of agent affectedness The semantics of affectedness inherent to ‘eat’ is reflected in a number of languages through the use of this verb as an auxiliary, as a light verb in noun-verb constructions, and other grammaticalised uses. In most of these languages such uses of ‘eat’ express a sense of undergoing, affectedness or adversativity: (4.26)

Korean (Isolate; Jee-Hong Kim p.c.): ku-ka sonkkarak-ul callu-a mok-ot-ta he-nom finger-acc  cut-conn eat-past-decl ‘He accidentally cut (one of) his fingers.’

(4.27)

Turkish (Turkic, Altaic; Gerjan van Schaaik p.c.): Yalnızca yirmi sopa ye-di only twenty stick eat-past ‘(S)he had 20 strokes of the cane.’

(4.28)

Sinhala (Indo-European, Indic; Keenan 1985 :259): Kikili lamajagan maerun kae:va chicken child.ins death eat ‘The chicken was killed by the child.’



Prototypical Transitivity

(4.29)

Dulong/Rawang (Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman; LaPolla 2000 :309): àng-s`vng tvp ké bǿ-à 3sg-loc be.arrested eat pfv-3+tr.past ‘He was arrested.’

Perhaps most interestingly, Hindi-Urdu uses the light verb khaa ‘eat’ in certain types of constructions with experiencer verbs, namely those where the subject is attributed a certain degree of control or agency: (4.30)

Hindi-Urdu (Davison 1990 :356): Pitaa-nee apnee beeTee-par taras khaaii father-erg self ’s son-on pity eat.pfv ‘The father felt/showed pity for his son.’

This contrasts with a construction with a dative subject and the light verb ‘come’, where no control is implied: (4.31)

Hindi-Urdu (Davison 1990 :356): Pitaa-koo apnee beeTee-par taras aaii father-dat self ’s son-on pity come.pfv ‘The father felt/??showed pity for his son.’

In other words, ‘eat’ is used in cases where the subject is seen as agentive and affected (cf. the discussion of experiencer verbs in chapter 8). It should be noted, however, that it also occurs in a number of cases where no control is implied, and that in e.g. Korean, lack of control is specifically implied by the ‘eat’ construction. The analysis of ‘eat’ as an ‘affected-agent’ auxiliary is in other words not a crosslinguistically valid one, and possibly not even useful for Hindi-Urdu; but it seems clear that it functions as a marker of affectedness in all the examples above. Even in more familiar European languages, one finds colloquial expressions where ‘eat’ is used to express some form of adversativity or humiliation, such as English to eat humble pie, Quebec French manger un coup ‘eat a blow’ = ‘get hit’, Greek troo ksylo ‘eat wood’ = ‘get beaten up’, or Polish najesc sie wstydu ‘eat shame’ = ‘feel ashamed’. Other languages in which expressions with ‘eat’ with affected/adversative meaning are found include Persian (gham khordan ‘eat grief ’ = ‘feel sad’), Balochi (za wәrәg ‘eat insults’ = ‘be insulted’, Farrell 1995), Chinese (chi ku ‘eat bitterness’ = ‘suffer’), Fijian (kana i-caqe ‘eat kicking’ = ‘get kicked’) and Bislama 7.

For details on grammaticalised ingestive verbs in Korean, see Rhee (2003).

8. I thank the following subscribers on the LINGUIST list for providing the examples cited here: Mark Brand (English), Rebecca Smollett (Quebec French), Costas Gabrielatos (Greek), Andrzej Zychla (Polish), Ahmad R. Lofti and Lameen Souag (Persian), Lance Eccles (Chinese), and John Lynch (Fijian and Bislama).



Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

(kaekae han ‘eat hand’ = ‘get punched’). The use of ‘eat’ as an auxiliary in a periphrastic perfective construction in Bagvalal (Nakh-Daghestanian, Maisak 1999) might conceivably be related to the delimiting function of the property of affectedness as described by Tenny (1994).

4.5 Alternative analyses The intransitive behaviour of verbs with affected agents is predicted by the Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis; consequently, the data presented in this chapter may be seen as supporting the hypothesis. We might want to ask, however, whether other ways of defining the transitive prototype may not explain these data just as well? Firstly, as noted in the introduction to this chapter, several linguists have posited the non-affectedness of the agent participant as a criterion for transitivity, and so the reduced formal transitivity of clauses with affected agent arguments is clearly to be expected on the basis of such a definition. The contribution of the Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis is to explain why the agent of a prototypical transitive clause should be non-affected; it is a consequence of the principle of the distinctness of participants. Of the properties included in Hopper and Thompson’s list of Transitivity parameters, the most obvious candidate for an explanation for the intransitive behaviour of ‘eat’ verbs would appear to be parameter C, “aspect” – telic vs. atelic. As Hopper and Thompson’s Transitivity notion is explicitly defined as a property of clauses, not all their parameters are directly applicable to individual verbs; but for those that are, the verb ‘eat’ must be ranked as “high” at least for parameters A, B, E, H, and I: it involves two participants, denotes an “action”, is necessarily volitional, and takes an A which is “high in potency” (human or animate) and a highly affected O. Telicity, on the other hand, has sometimes been appealed to as an explanation for the aberrant behaviour of ‘eat’ verbs. Thus Van Valin and LaPolla characterise ‘eat’ as “not inherently telic” (1997 :112), while Tenny (1994) maintains that the telicity of ‘eat’ depends on the “delimitedness” or “non-delimitedness” of its measuring argument, that is, its object: “If Chuck eats an apple, he finishes eating when the apple is gone, but if he eats ice cream, he continues eating for an indefinite period of time, because there is an indefinite quantity of ice cream. (He may even continue eating ice cream forever, if he is in a world that never runs out of ice cream)” (Tenny 1994 :24). Quite apart from the fact that the real world does not actually work this way – real people do not have unlimited capacities for food consumption and therefore cannot “go on eating forever” – the telicity of ‘eat’ is not in fact purely a function of



Prototypical Transitivity

the properties of its object. We see this if we examine the properties of the English verb eat used intransitively – that is, when no object is present. A common test for telicity is the possibility of cooccurring with adverbials of completion such as in an hour. Telic predicates are felicitous with such adverbials (The snow melted in an hour), while atelic ones are not (*John danced in an hour). Atelic predicates, on the other hand, may take adverbials of duration: John danced for an hour. It is well known that telicity depends not only on the predicate of a clause but also on the nature of its object, if it has an object, so that bare-plural or mass noun objects lead to atelic readings (Dowty 1991): John built a chair in an hour/*for an hour vs. John built chairs for an hour/*in an hour. This variation is not specific to ‘eat’ but is apparently characteristic of verbs with incremental themes (Dowty 1991, Tenny 1994). The interesting question in the case of ‘eat’ is how this verb behaves when it is used intransitively, i.e. when the presence of different kinds of objects cannot influence the reading. Intransitive ‘eat’ is in fact perfectly compatible with an adverbial of completion: I ate in five minutes, then rushed off to work. This clearly shows that intransitive ‘eat’ does in fact have a delimited – that is, a telic – reading; and since no object is present, this telic reading cannot derive from the “delimitedness” of the object. Rather, the telic reading arises from the affectedness of the agent. As noted above, intransitive ‘eat’ is often used in the sense ‘eat until the desired effect on the agent is achieved’, and it is the attainment of this effect – the agent’s being full rather than hungry – which constitutes the endpoint of eat in five minutes. On the other hand, we also find ‘eat’ with adverbials of duration: We ate all evening. This is a rather striking alternation which to my knowledge is relatively rare with intransitive verbs, though it does occur with at least two other types of English intransitives. One is certain “reflexive” verbs of body care such as shower and bathe, which can also be construed either with adverbials of completion or of duration: I showered in five minutes or I showered for half an hour. The completive reading here implies a particular result state of the agent; I showered in five minutes means that it took me five minutes to attain the desired degree of cleanness, whereas I showered for half an hour only means that I spent half an hour standing under the shower. In the latter case, no result state is entailed; the implication of cleanness can be cancelled by a sentence such as I showered for half an hour but I still couldn’t get all the dirt off my skin. Secondly, the alternation is shown by at least some verbs whose subject undergoes a process which is conceived of as typically leading to a result state, but which is in principle independent of this result state; that is, it may be halted before the state is achieved or extended past the point where the state is achieved, while still being essentially the same process. This is the case for the verbs cook and bake; the



Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

sentence The potatoes cooked in ten minutes implies that at the end of the ten minutes the potatoes had reached the state of being “cooked” and fit to eat. By contrast, The potatoes cooked for half an hour does not entail anything about the state of the potatoes at the end of the half-hour; it may equally well be followed by...and were still rock-hard as by...and then they were perfect. What these different verbs have in common is that they all refer, when used with an adverb of completion, to a result state of the subject argument; that is, their subjects are affected by the action in question. Once again, then, eat here patterns with verbs which are characterised by affecting their subject argument; reflexive verbs such as shower and bathe and patient-subject verbs like (intransitive) cook and bake. The alternation between a completive and a durative reading once again reflects the two possible perspectives on an act of eating: as an act of achieving a certain effect on the agent (eat in five minutes), or as an act of consuming some patient. On this latter perspective, the event may be construed as either telic or atelic depending on the nature of the patient: if the patient consists of an unspecified mass of foodstuffs, the act may be conceived of as going on for an indefinite period. As already noted, though, this is the case for incremental-object verbs in general, and is not considered to detract from the basic telicity of verbs like ‘build’. Furthermore, the possibility of a telic reading for intransitive ‘eat’ is unusual for intransitive uses of verbs that may delete their objects in English; we may say Dad cooked dinner in half an hour or Dad cooked for half an hour but not *Dad cooked in half an hour; Mary sewed a dress in an hour or Mary sewed for an hour but not *Mary sewed in an hour. The question is whether either reading of ‘eat’ – telic or atelic – is in some sense basic with respect to the other, an interpretation which seems to be implied in Van Valin and LaPolla’s characterisation of ‘eat’ as “not inherently telic”. Since what determines its telicity seems to be the choice of perspective – whether one chooses to focus on the effects of the act on the agent or the patient – it seems difficult to argue for one use or the other as “basic” or “inherent”. However, determining such as basic use is not really necessary for the present purpose, which is to determine whether telicity can be invoked as an explanation for the intransitive characteristics of ‘eat’ verbs. What is relevant is that the verb has a telic reading even when it is used intransitively. In other words, the intransitive use of ‘eat’ verbs cannot be explained by appealing to the atelicity of such verbs: if ‘eat’ can be used intransitively because it has a low value for the parameter of telicity, then we would expect an intransitive clause with ‘eat’ to necessarily have an atelic reading. But if a verb may be telic and still occur in intransitive contexts, then it cannot be the telic-atelic parameter which is the source of its reduced transitivity. A rather more elaborate – and in the words of Newman and Rice (2006), “more provocative” – analysis of ‘eat’ verbs is found in Role and Reference Grammar, as



Prototypical Transitivity

presented in Van Valin and LaPolla (1997). The RRG approach to verbal semantics is based on the traditional Aktionsart distinctions originating in Vendler (1967), and assumes the four basic classes of state, activity, accomplishment and achievement verbs. ‘Eat’ and similar verbs are analysed as activity verbs with derived accomplishment uses. That is, ‘eat’ has the basic lexical structure of an activity verb: do’(x, [eat (x,y)]). When the verb is used as an active accomplishment, a modifier representing the result of the activity is added, giving the logical structure do’(x, [eat (x,y)]) & BECOME consumed’(y) (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997 :111ff, 180). The analysis assumes a special status for the second argument of two-place activity verbs: they are so-called inherent arguments, being nonreferential and expressing “an intrinsic facet of the meaning of the verb” rather than referring to any specific participant in the event. Furthermore, by virtue of being nonreferential, such arguments have no semantic macrorole. Semantic macroroles are generalised semantic roles each subsuming a number of specific argument types such as agent, effector (cf. 3.2.3), and instrument. Transitive verbs are characterised by having two macroroles in their logical structure: an “agent-type role” called actor and a “patient-type role” called undergoer. However, the second argument of activity verbs are not undergoers and so do not represent a macrorole: “if [an argument] does not refer to any specific participant in a state of affairs, it cannot be an undergoer, because undergoer arguments refer to the participants which are viewed as primarily affected in the state of affairs; accordingly, undergoers must be referential” (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997 :149). It is this lack of a second macrorole which is taken to account for the frequently observed intransitive behaviour of ‘eat’ verbs. The analysis hinges on the notion of “inherent argument”; the second argument of two-place activity verbs is taken to be qualitatively different from any other argument types in the RRG framework. As evidence of this unique status of inherent arguments is cited two properties supposedly characteristic of them alone: they can be freely omitted in English and many other languages (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997 :123), and when they are omitted, they cannot be interpreted as having a discourse referent; thus one cannot respond to the question Where is my sandwich? with Bill is eating, meaning that he is eating the sandwich in question (p. 122). The latter is in fact a property of the indefinite object deletion construction in general, not of specific classes of verbs; it will be discussed in detail in chapter 6. Here we will simply note that in contexts where highly transitive verbs can occur without objects, exactly the same holds of them: one can say John murdered for the money, but not What happened to Mary? *Her husband murdered for the money, on the reading that Mary was the victim of the murder. The claim that inherent arguments can be freely omitted in English seems difficult to uphold as well. A verb like chop would appear to fulfill the criteria for a two-place activity verb, in that its second argument may be nonreferential: chop



Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

wood need not refer to any specific affected patient, any more than eat pizza does. Nevertheless, English chop does not readily omit its object. If the second argument of a verb like chop is indeed an inherent argument, then, the generalisation that inherent arguments are freely omissible in English simply does not hold. Finally, analysing ‘eat’ as an activity verb with accomplishment uses fails to account for the possibility of a telic reading for intransitive ‘eat’, as discussed above. Since the “activity” version of ‘eat’ is the one lacking an undergoer macrorole (is “M-intransitive” in the terminology of Van Valin and LaPolla), to the extent that ‘eat’ can be used in a syntactically intransitive clause, it should have an activity reading. Activities, however, by definition are not telic; and so the possibility of using ‘eat’ intransitively in sentences such as I ate in five minutes before rushing off to class remain unexplained in this analysis. For an account basing itself on distinctions in verbal aspect, this must be considered a serious weakness. The intransitive behaviour of ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ verbs is sometimes ascribed to their patient argument being generic, nonspecific, or irrelevant in the context; this might be seen as a variant of the “no semantic macrorole” analysis, in that it argues that the second argument of ‘eat’ verbs is somehow different from that of other two-participant verbs. However, such statements represent more of a description of the circumstances under which ‘eat’ may omit its object than an explanation of why just these verbs and not others show such behaviour. Other, highly transitive verbs in e.g. English generally do not allow generic objects to be omitted; one would say He kills people rather than *He kills. (There are, however, circumstances under which even highly transitive verbs such as kill may omit their object; see chapter 6). The claim made by the analysis presented here is that it is precisely the affectedness of the agent which allows the object of ‘eat’ and similar verbs to be construed as “irrelevant”; since the effect of the act on the agent himself is the primary goal of the agent’s acting, the patient is of secondary interest and relatively low in distinctness, and may therefore be demoted or omitted altogether. This and other circumstances which favour indefinite object deletion are discussed in chapter 6. To summarise, the assumption that ‘eat’ and similar verbs are characterised semantically by having an Affected Agent argument accounts in a simple and systematic manner for a set of facts which otherwise turns out to be very difficult to explain. The Affected Agent, then, it not simply a theoretical construct required by the model of prototypical transitivity as characterised by the distinctness of participants, but a relevant category for the purpose of linguistic generalisation.



Prototypical Transitivity

4.6 Other affected-agent constructions We have focused on ‘eat’ as a verb whose lexical meaning centrally includes agent affectedness, and for which data is readily available from a wide range of languages showing that they tend to occur in intransitive constructions. There are, however, other ways in which affectedness of the agent may be reflected in language structure, not as a direct function of the semantics of the verb itself but by the use of specific formal constructions to indicate that the agentive participant is construed as affected by the event in some way. Perhaps the most obvious example is middle constructions, a main function of which is, according to Kemmer (1993 :130) “to code the affectedness of an initiating entity” (my emphasis). Kemmer argues, for example, that the rarity of middle marking on verbs of perception compared to other types of verbs of experience such as emotion or cognition verbs might be due to the low degree to which perception affects the experiencer: “we might expect that middle-marking, which expresses affectedness of the Initiator, would be less likely to appear on such verbs than the other two main types of mental event” (Kemmer 1993 :137). Of course, not all initiating entities are agents, and middle-type constructions are not restricted to marking Affected Agents but rather are used in a range of instances where an entity is seen as to some extent instigating or controlling the event, while at the same time being affected by it. Testelec (1998 :40) defines as “semantic middles” “[v]erbs with two or more participants that have more than one affected or more than one controlling participant”, in other words verbs where the distribution of control and affectedness across the two participants diverges from the maximal opposition characteristic of fully transitive clauses (see also chapter 8). In some languages, the same formally intransitive construction is used for agents which are adversely affected by the verbal event as for another type of nonprototypical “agent”, namely those which act nonvolitionally (cf 5.3.2). Thus the German sentence in (4.32) in fact has both an involuntary-agent and an affectedagent reading; the Finnish ablative-nominative construction in (4.33) is similarly used for both involuntary and adversely affected agents: (4.32)

German (Indo-European, Germanic; Kittilä 2002a :133) Mir ist der teller zerbrochen I.dat be.pres.3sg nom plate break.ptcp a. ‘I accidentally broke the plate.’ b. ‘The plate broke on me/I was adversely affected by the plate’s breaking.’



Chapter 4.  The Affected Agent 

(4.33) Finnish (Uralic, Finno-Ugric; Kittilä to appear) a. miehe-ltä puto-si kuppi man-abl fall.down-3sg.past cup.nom ‘The man accidentally dropped the cup.’ b. miehe-ltä kuol-i koira man-abl die-3sg.past dog.nom ‘The dog died on the man.’

Similar patterns are found e.g. in Greek and Japanese (Kittilä to appear). In the Daghestanian language Lak, the absolutive rather than the ergative case is used for subjects of transitive events which are construed as somehow affected by the event: (4.34) Lak (Nakh-Daghestanian, Daghestanian; Kazenin 1998 :112): a. ga-nal bax-l-ej bu-r he-erg house.abs 3cl.sell-dur-cvb.pres 3cl.aux-3sg ‘He has sold the house.’ b. ga bax-l-ej u-r he.abs house.abs 3cl.sell-dur-cvb.pres 1cl.aux-3sg ‘He has sold the house.’

In (4.34a), nothing is stated beyond the fact that the agent performed the act of selling the house; (4.34b), however, implies that this act had some effect upon the present state of the agent, for example that he is now homeless, or that he has acquired a lot of money as a result of the sale. Compare this “double-absolutive” construction to the use of the absolutive on the agent of ‘eat’ in ergative languages like Samoan, Greenlandic, and Trumaí (4.3.2 and 4.3.5).

4.7 Concluding remarks This chapter has focused on one specific empirical prediction following from the definition of transitivity presented in chapter 3, namely that verbs or constructions with Affected Agent arguments should tend to occur in formally intransitive constructions in at least some languages. The main reason for treating this in such detail is that it is in fact a common, but largely ignored phenomenon – indeed, it is not at all unusual for ‘eat’ to be cited as an example of a prototypical transitive verb (see e.g. Andrews 1985). I hope to have shown beyond reasonable doubt that this is not in fact the case. However, the definition of prototypical transitivity illustrated in Table 1 clearly makes similar predictions for a range of other semantic participant types – in-



Prototypical Transitivity

deed, all those characterised by a feature specification different from those defining the Agent and Patient. These types will be discussed in the next chapter.

chapter 5

Transitivity in verbs and clauses

5.1 Introduction In this chapter, we will look more closely at two of the main implications of defining prototypical transitivity in terms of the distinctness of participants. Firstly, the feature-based definition of the Agent and Patient categories in 3.2.6, and the claim that having two participants with exactly these properties is the basic defining property of a transitive clause, entails that all other distributions of the semantic features [±Volitional], [±Instigating], [±Affected] across the participants of a twoparticipant clause should lead to the use of a construction other than a fully transitive clause in at least some languages. That this is so for clauses with Affected Agents was demonstrated in chapter 4; we will now proceed to look at all other possible combinations of the three features. Secondly, if the distinctness of participants is at the core of the semantic notion of transitivity, then we would expect that all the semantic properties generally associated with transitivity can in some way be related to this distinction. This is an important point, since the modern use in linguistic theory of the term “transitivity” differs considerably from the traditional use, nowadays considered rather simplistic, of the term “transitive verb” to refer to a verb which requires two argument NPs to form a grammatical clause. Transitivity in the twenty-first century is a complex notion which relates not only to the subcategorisation requirements of verbal lexemes, but to a number of other properties which can only be identified at the level of the clause. Furthermore, transitivity is no longer a matter of a simple subdivision into transitive and intransitive verbs or clauses; modern linguistics operates with transitivity as a gradable notion, where a clause may be less transitive than a highly transitive clause but nevertheless more transitive than a simple intransitive clause. The realisation that the phenomenon of transitivity in fact depends on such diverse factors – on the one hand, semantic properties of verbs and of the arguments they are compatible with, on the other hand, seemingly unrelated properties functioning at clause level – represents an important insight and has allowed for the explanation of a wide range of linguistic phenomena in terms of the notion



Prototypical Transitivity

of transitivity. On the other hand, it has also increased the vagueness of the concept “transitivity” considerably. A strictly formal definition in terms of number of core arguments – intransitive verbs are those which take one argument, transitive verbs are those which take two – has limited practical usefulness given the great number of cases which do not fall clearly into one or the other category – “labile verbs” which may take either one or two arguments (cf. chapter 6), “extended intransitive” verbs which require a second argument encoded differently from that of core transitive verbs, and so on. Its advantage, however, is that it at least allows for a clear understanding of what is meant by the term: the transitivity of a verb refers to its ability to occur with more than one core argument. The composite concept of transitivity that has been developed over the past few decades, on the other hand, allows for more accurate analyses of actual language data, but leaves uncertain precisely what kind of phenomenon we are referring to with the term “transitivity”. It appears to be nothing more than a label attached to a cluster of diverse properties, some related to verbal semantics, some to properties of core arguments, some to grammatical operators at clause level; and if there is a link between these different components of the transitivity concept, a “superordinate semantic notion which will include all the Transitivity components” (Hopper and Thompson 1980 :279), then our understanding of it is vague at best. This chapter will demonstrate that the notion of distinctness of participants is in fact a good candidate for such a superordinate semantic notion, and that all the factors shown by Hopper and Thompson and others to be relevant for the transitivity concept can be understood as ultimately influencing the distinctness of participants.

5.2 Previous feature-decompositional accounts The contrast defined in chapter 3 between an Agent defined as [+VOL, +INST, –AFF] and a Patient defined as [–VOL, –INST, +AFF] clearly implies the possibility of other participant types defined by other configurations of values of these features. It remains to be demonstrated that these other configurations define linguistically relevant categories. Attempts at defining thematic or participant roles in terms of similar feature sets have been made by a number of linguists. For example, Reinhart (2002), writing within a generative framework, assumes the binary properties “cause change” [±c] and “mental state” [±m]. These define, among others, the roles of agent [+c+m], instrument/cause [+c–m], experiencer [–c+m] and theme/patient [–c–m], as well as some roles which are defined as having a value for only one of the two properties. The property of affectedness is not a part of this system, which



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

consequently conflates certain roles which are fairly commonly distinguished in language structure, such as instrument and “cause” (termed Force below), and patient and unaffected “theme”. The approach most similar to that presented here is that of Rozwadowska (1988), who argues for a semantic feature decomposition of argument role-types essentially identical to that suggested in chapter 3. Rozwadowska labels her three binary features change, defined as the property of being affected physically or psychologically in the course of action, process, or state, corresponding to what has here been labelled “affectedness”; sentient, which denotes conscious involvement in the action or state and so corresponds to my term “volitionality”; and cause, which is more or less the same as my “instigation” (Rozwadowska 1988 :158–159). She then sets out the following table, where a number of common semantic roletypes are defined in terms of these features: (5.1) Feature interpretation of thematic relations, Rozwadowska (1988 :159) Feature Sentient Cause Change Thematic relation +

+

+

+

+

–�

+ ? –

– + +

+ – –

– –

– –

+ –

Affected Agent (e.g., Agents of monotransitive verbs that undergo some change; traditionally referred to as Agents and Themes at the same time: John rolled down the hill.) Agent (Agents of prototypical Agent-Patient verbs: destroy, beat, kill, hit, write etc.) Experiencer, possibly Recipient and Possessor Instruments Object – Cause of emotion (i.e., Neutral, Rappaport’s Experienced, Jackendoff ’s Percept) Patient (i.e., affected objects of agentive verbs) Neutral viewed as a mere object rather than a cause; also object of the verb enter (in John entered the room.)

As the table shows, Rozwadowska also operates with the concept of “Affected Agent”, similar to that discussed in chapter 4, though the term is not employed in her account outside of the overview in (5.1). She defines Experiencer arguments as being [+sentient] and [+affected], and Instruments as [+cause], [–change], and unspecified for sentience. Instruments, she says, “seem to have an intermediate



Prototypical Transitivity

status between Agents and Neutrals [Rozwadowska’s “Neutral” is defined as a relation in which both affectedness and control are absent, ÅN]. A possible explanation could be that although they lack conscious involvement, they still possess some mechanical or physical control” (Rozwadowska 1988 :160). Rozwadowska’s analysis is designed to account for the restrictions on argument types of derived nominals such as the enemy’s destruction of the city/the city’s destruction/*the enemy’s destruction (on an agentive reading of enemy). The feature system allows her to formulate generalisations over classes of arguments that share a feature specification such as [+change]. However, it is unclear on the question of whether all possible feature combinations are taken to define actual linguistically relevant categories; the categories [+sentient, –cause, –change] and [–sentient, +cause, +change] are considered unlikely to define any linguistically relevant participant types and are excluded from the system. Furthermore, the fact that the Instrument category is allowed to be unspecified for the feature [± sentience], while all other categories are fully specified for all features, suggests a certain vagueness in the concepts underlying the features employed. If being unspecified for a feature means that a participant filling a certain role may be either + or – for the feature in question, then an Instrument which is [+sentient] would be indistinguishable from an Agent in terms of feature specifications, while a [–sentient] Instrument would be identical to the “Object – Cause of emotion” category – in other words, the Instrument category would not be uniquely identified with respect to the other categories of the system. Alternatively, the category of Instrument must be taken simply to have no value for the feature “sentient”. But this calls into question the validity of the attempt to characterise participant types in terms of just the three features in question; if all the features cannot be given a specific value for all relevant types of participant, then one must ask whether these features in fact constitue an adequate tool for characterising such participant types. In what follows, I will argue that all possible combinations of the three semantic features [±Volitional], [±Instigating], [±Affected] do in fact define categories which correspond to attested formal distinctions in language, although some are more rarely distinguished than others. Furthermore, I will argue that the fact that certain commonly distinguished “semantic roles”, such as recipients, experiencers and beneficiaries, are often given similar formal treatment in language can be understood as a consequence of their sharing the same values for these three semantic features.



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

5.3 Semantic specifications of participant types 5.3.1 [+VOL, –INST, +AFF]: Volitional Undergoers The previous chapter discussed in some detail constructions where the agentive participant is itself affected by the event. Conversely, the Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis would predict that patientive arguments which are seen as volitionally involved in the event which affects them should also tend to be encoded in constructions other than a fully transitive clause. I will refer to such participants as volitional undergoers (rather than patients, since Patients are here explicitly defined as [–VOL]). There are in fact few examples of this described in the literature, though some do exist. The Icelandic dative-accusative contrast in examples (5.2ab) appears to reflect a semantic contrast of volitional vs. nonvolitional involvement on the part of the object participant: (5.2) Icelandic (Indo-European, Germanic; Bar dal 2001 :146): a. Hann klóra i mig b. Hann klóra i mér he.nom scratched me.acc he.nom scratched me.dat ‘He scratched me(acc).’ ‘He scratched me(dat).’

Although the English translation is the same in (a) and (b), there is a clear difference in meaning. In (5.2a), with accusative object, the scratching is presented as an act of violence, probably painful to the Patient. (5.2b), on the other hand, means that I had an itch and the subject participant helped out by scratching me, perhaps in a place I couldn’t reach myself. In other words, the dative-marked participant in (5.3b) voluntarily submits to being scratched, whereas the accusative-marked participant is affected against his/her will. There are other languages where the concept of a patientive participant “letting” something happen to it leads to the use of a formally intransitive construction. For instance, in Classical Sanskrit, the contrast between the active and the middle causatives illustrate a similar semantic distinction: (5.3) Sanskrit (Klaiman 1988 :36): a. ārohayati rājā hastina (hastipakai ) causes.to.mount.act king elephant.acc by.elephant.keepers ‘The king has the elephant mounted (by the elephant-keepers).’ b. ārohayate hastī (svayameva) causes.to.mount.middle elephant.nom (on.its.own) ‘The elephant lets itself be mounted.’

 Prototypical Transitivity

This alternation is particularly interesting in light of Kemmer’s (1993) analysis of the middle as reflecting a low degree of distinguishability of participants, that is, “Initiator” and “Endpoint” properties converging on the same participant. Under the current analysis, the volitional involvement of a patientive participant is clearly an instance of relatively low participant distinguishability. As already noted, however, examples such as these appear to be quite rare. This could represent a difficulty for the current analysis: if the Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis is correct, wouldn’t we expect distinctive marking of volitional as opposed to nonvolitional undergoers to be fairly common? There is another prediction implicit in the model of participant types as being representable by combinations of the semantic feature values [±Volitional], [±Instigating], [±Affected], namely that participants with similar semantic specifications should be expected to receive similar formal encoding. For instance, we saw in chapter 4 that Affected Agent arguments in a number of languages are treated similarly to other types of A participants which are affected. The feature specification of a volitionally involved undergoer would be [+VOL, –INST, +AFF]. In fact, this specification appears to be equally appropriate for a number of other commonly recognised participant types, namely experiencers, recipients, and beneficiaries. Experiencers are sometimes defined as participants which are animate and affected (see e.g. Givón 1984a, where the argument type in question is called a “dative”), but they are more appropriately characterised as affected by virtue of being sentient. The particular type of affectedness registered with an experiencer argument, that of experiencing a mental or physical state or a sensory impression, only applies to participants which are sentient. They may not volitionally expose themselves to this type of affectedness, but they must be volitionally involved in the sense that their mental or sensory capacities must be engaged in the event. The requirement that a participant’s involvement in an event depend on the participant’s being volitional or sentient for it to be counted as [+Volitional], then, clearly applies to experiencers. It should be noted, however, that the term ‘experiencer’, as it is commonly used, does not denote a homogeneous category with respect to our three semantic features; this will be further discussed in chapter 8. Recipients are similarly affected in the sense that something comes into their possession which they did not previously have, and volitional in the sense that only volitional/sentient beings can reasonably be said to receive or possess something. Beneficiaries by definition receive some beneficial effect from the action, something which again generally applies only to volitional or sentient beings; it is clearly odd to speak of a nonsentient entity as “benefitting” from an event. To say that all of these participant types are characterised by the feature specifications [+VOL, –INST, +AFF] is not to say that they are semantically identical,



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

or that all languages will treat them as one category formally. Individual languages may make more fine-grained semantic distinctions that are not captured by the feature system, and so subdivide the categories defined by the feature clusters into smaller subcategories. However, the feature system is meant to capture the basic semantic differences which govern transitivity alternations crosslinguistically. What this analysis does entail, therefore, is an expectation that there will be a general tendency towards similar formal treatment of participants with the same feature specification across languages. Experiencers, recipients and beneficiaries are indeed frequently subsumed under the same case-marker – the dative, which will be discussed in chapter 8. Note that the volitional undergoer in (5.2b) is also marked with the dative case, cf. the examples below: (5.4) Icelandic (Indo-European, Germanic; Smith 1997 :131, 137) a. Hann gaf mér bókina he.nom give.3sg.past I.dat the.book.acc.sg ‘He gave me the book.’ b. Mér likar I.dat please.3sg.pres ‘I like it; it pleases me.’

Volitional undergoers, then, have the same semantic feature specification as e.g. experiencers and beneficiaries, and would be expected to receive similar formal encoding. Furthermore, the notion of volitionally submitting to being affected strongly suggests a beneficial effect as the participant’s motivation for undergoing the event. In other words, the default interpretation of a volitional undergoer may be as a beneficiary. Conversely, one might argue that a beneficiary can be seen as a kind of volitional undergoer, in that it is not clear that a participant can be said to benefit from an effect which it does not wish to receive. In other words, beneficiaries and volitional undergoers are semantically so close as to be almost indistinguishable. The fact that very few languages are recorded as showing a specific marking for volitional undergoers is explainable as a result of this semantic similarity – either because the semantic distinction is so subtle that linguists have described them as belonging to the more generally familiar category of beneficiaries, or simply because languages themselves treat the two categories in the same way. The latter is exactly what would be expected from their sharing the same semantic feature specification. A language which makes a subtle distinction in this respect is Yurakaré, an unclassified language of Bolivia (van Gijn 2006). Yurakaré has a complex system of applicative markers which add object arguments of different semantic specifica-



Prototypical Transitivity

tions to the clause structure – comitative objects (‘he walked with it’), cooperative objects (‘he did the work with him/he helped him do the work), purposive objects (‘he went to get his wife’), and what van Gijn (2006) calls indirect and affected objects, respectively. The indirect-object applicative n- is used for many of the functions typically associated with datives: goals, recipients, addressees, and beneficiaries, as well as the experiencer arguments of some verbs of emotion: (5.5) Yurakaré (unclassified; van Gijn 2006: 154–155, 163): a. A-mumuy pa-n-kaya-shti 3sg.poss-all 2pl-io-give-fut:1sg.S ‘I will give it all to you (pl.)’ b. Ti-n-ewe-ø ti-sibë=y 1sg-io-sweep-3 1sg-house=loc ‘He swept my house for me.’ c. Ti-n-kukku 1sg-io-nice ‘I like it.’

Detrimentally affected ‘interested parties’, that is, malefactives, may also be expressed with the same marker, but more commonly take the ‘affected object’ applicative la-: (5.6)

Yurakaré (van Gijn 2006 :157) Ti-la-ense-ø ti-awaryente 1sg-afo-drink-3 1sg-alcohol ‘He drank my alcohol on me.’

Van Gijn (2006 :157) further notes that “the affected [i.e. malefactive, ÅN] object does not need to be animate, which makes the construction slightly different from the typical ethical dative, which is always animate”; an ethical dative is described as referring to an interested party for which the circumstance described by the predicate has a significant effect, and which is not itself in control over the event (Fried 1999). In other words, for a beneficial effect to be ascribed to an entity, that entity must typically be sentient; detrimental effects, on the other hand, can in principle be ascribed to any entity. Benefactives, then, are partly defined by their sentient involvement (their “interest” in the event), whereas malefactives may be conceptualised as more similar to regular Patients, as one does not generally submit voluntarily to some detrimental effect. On the other hand, it is of course possible for an event to have a regular Patient and an additional detrimentally affected



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

participant, as in (5.6), and in this respect, a malefactive shares with a benefactive the property of being an “additional” affected participant. Proposing a label for the category including all the different types of participant discussed above is not unproblematic. As noted above, a similar category has sometimes been called “dative”, but as this is primarily the name for a formal rather than a semantic category, I prefer to avoid it here (see chapter 8). I will use the term Volitional Undergoer as a cover term for all participant types characterisable as [+VOL, –INST, +AFF], since it refers explicitly to the positive defining properties of this category: Volitional involvement, and being affected by or “undergoing” the event. Note that this term was used above for a subset of the [+VOL, –INST, +AFF] category, namely participants voluntarily submitting to being affected in some way; in the following, the term will be used for the category as a whole. 5.3.2 [–VOL, +INST, –AFF]: Force The [–Volitional, +Instigating, –Affected] category conforms to Cruse’s (1973) definition of an agent as an object which employs its own energy in carrying out an action (Cruse 1973 :21), but deviates from our definition of Agent in that it is not volitionally involved in this action. We saw in 3.2.5 that a number of languages encode such participants differently from canonical Agents. This category actually subsumes two types of entities which have traditionally been considered as distinct: self-driven natural forces with no capacity for volitional action, as in The tornado smashed the village, and human or animate actors which are capable of volitional action but whose involvement in the particular action in question is nonvolitional, as in the examples in 3.2.5. As was noted in 5.3.1 above, this does not necessarily mean that all languages will treat inanimate “forces” and animate but nonvolitional agents in the same way; but we would expect to find languages which do, on the basis of their shared feature specification. Such languages certainly exist; a trivial example is English, where both nonvolitional actors and inanimate forces tend to get encoded as transitive subjects – as do regular, volitional Agents. However, even languages which code the former two argument types differently from Agents may give these two the same formal encoding. Thus, for example, in the Polynesian language East Futuna (French Overseas Territory of Wallis and Futuna), both nonvolitional animate actors and inanimate forces take the oblique marker i (iate in 5.7b is the



Prototypical Transitivity

variant of i used before personal pronouns), while volitional Agents are marked with the ergative preposition e: (5.7) East Futuna (Austronesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian; Claire Moyse p.c.) a. Na titï e ia le ipu past break erg 3sg def bowl ‘He broke the bowl (on purpose)’ b. Na mafa’a le ipu iate ia past be.broken def bowl obl 3sg ‘He broke the bowl (accidentally)’ c. Na maumau le kolo i le matagi past be.destroyed def village obl def wind ‘The storm destroyed the village’

Japanese disallows both inanimate forces and nonvolitional actors as subjects of canonical transitive clauses: (5.8) Japanese (Isolate; Van Valin and LaPolla 1997 :120) a. *Sensoo ga ookuno heesi o korosi-ta war nom many soldiers acc kill-past ‘The war killed many soldiers.’ b. *Zyoon wa ukkari-to megane o wat-ta Joan top unintentionally glasses acc break-past ‘Joan unintentionally broke the eye-glasses.’

For a discussion of languages where the distinction between inanimate forces and animate “agents” acting involuntarily play a role in the encoding of two-participant clauses, see Kittilä (to appear). In this book, the term Force will be used to refer to any participant characterisable as [–VOL, +INST, –AFF], regardless of whether the participant in question is an inanimate “force” or an animate “involuntary agent”. Kittilä (to appear) makes an additional distinction between two kinds of nonvolitional involvement: that of the instigation of the event itself being nonvolitional, which is what he terms “Involuntary Agent Events”, and that of events which are “accidental” only in the sense that the outcome differs from that intended by the agent. Sinhala is argued to distinguish formally between these two types of “involuntariness”: (5.9) Sinhala (Indo-European, Indic; Wijayawardhana et al. 1995 :107–108): a. Lamәya bat kææva child.nom rice eat.past.act ‘The child ate rice.’



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

b. Lamәya- ә vaha kævuna child-dat poison eat.past.pass ‘The child (accidentally) ate something poisonous.’ c. Lamәya kooppe binda child.nom cup break.past.act ‘The child (deliberately) broke the cup.’ d. Lamәya-atin kooppe bi duna child-ins cup break.past.pass ‘The child (accidentally) broke the cup.’

From these data, it would appear that Sinhala uses the instrumental case for an agent-like participant whose instigation of the act itself is nonvolitional (5.9d), but the dative for a participant which does act volitionally but achieves an outcome different from that which was intended (5.9b). In the definition of a prototypical transitive event in 3.2.6, I specified that the effect on the patient should be the target of the Agent’s volitional act; we saw in 4.3.5 that Chepang, for instance, only employs the “Goal” marker when the participant in question is actually the intended target of the event. Thus the properties of Volitionality and Affectedness must, in the prototypical case, be taken to be linked, in that the latter should be the explicit goal of the former. However, the definition does not account for a formal distinction between [–Volitional] in the sense of “not acting volitionally in instigating the event” and [–Volitional] in the sense of “intending an effect different from what actually occurred”. It is not obvious that this distinction is actually what is marked by the alternation between dative and instrumental case in (5.9), however. It should be noted that the pertinent example – (5.9b) – involves the verb ‘eat’, a verb which was shown in chapter 4 to behave unusually in many respects across languages. More to the point, the dative in (5.9b) might be analysed as marking the (unintended and adverse) effect on the agent resulting from the eating of the wrong thing, rather than the fact that the effect on the object was unintended. Note that the same construction, with a dative-marked subject, is also used in (5.10), with the verb ‘drink’, where the translation ‘accidentally swallow water’ must be read as meaning that the actual act of ingesting water was unintended, rather than its being directed towards the particular object in question. Again, the accidental swallowing of water must be taken to have an unintended and unpleasant effect on the agent: (5.10)

Sinhala (Wijayawardhana et al. 1995 :107) Ga gәtә væ eәko ә matә vaturә pevuna river fall.ger I.dat water drink.past.pass ‘When I fell into the river I (accidentally) swallowed water.’



Prototypical Transitivity

This fits the analysis of the Sinhala dative presented in Wijayawardhana et al (1995 :118): “In conjunction with passive morphology [the dative] marks an agent who is simultanously also an affected party”. By contrast, the nonvolitional act of breaking in (5.9d), with the instrumental case, is not cast as having any particular effect on the agent. The alternation between dative and instrumental case here shows a parallel to the dative-instrumental alternation on causees in causative constructions, to be discussed in 8.4.3; here, too, the difference can be analysed in terms of whether the causee is seen as directly affected by the causer’s act. Note that other languages cited in Kittilä’s paper, such as Finnish and Malay, use the same formal construction both for participants which involuntarily instigate an event and participants who accidentally target their (volitional) act at the wrong patient (Kittilä to appear). 5.3.3 [–VOL, +INST, +AFF]: Instrument In Rozwadowska (1988 :159), the feature combination [–sentient, +cause, +change] – corresponding to [–Volitional, +Instigating, +Affected] – is characterised as “dubious”, on the basis that it would “imply an unconscious causation directed toward itself ”, something she finds “difficult to imagine”. There is, however, a category frequently encoded in language which is adequately captured by this feature cluster – in fact, precisely the category which Rozwadowska has difficulties capturing in an adequate way within her system. Many languages distinguish formally between Forces, as defined above, and “instruments” – that is, between entities which bring about events by virtue of their own inherent power and entities which do so only through being manipulated by an agent participant. Thus, in Samoan, forces and instruments may both in principle occur either in the ergative or the locative case in a transitive clause, but instruments with no capacity to move or function without an external energy source are less likely to be encoded in the ergative: (5.11) Samoan (Austronesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian; Mosel and Hovdhaugen a. Na tapuni e le matagi le faitoto’a 1992 :429) past close erg art wind art door ‘The wind closed the door.’ b. E sasa le vao i le sapelu genr hit art weed loc art bush-knife ‘The weeds are cut with a bush-knife.’

How is such a distinction to be captured within the three-term feature-decompositional system developed here? The distinction does not so much seem to be a



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

matter of the presence or absence of volitionality or instigation as one of manner of instigation in nonvolitional entities – what one might call, to borrow a couple of terms from the literature on causation, “direct” and “mediated” instigation. Consider, however, what exactly it means to be an instrument: it is definable as an entity being manipulated by another entity in order to achieve an effect on a third entity. There are languages in which instruments and patients are, at least in some grammatical domains, treated as similar and categorised together. Thus in the Mon-Khmer language Jahai (Malaysia), there exists a nominalising affix deriving deverbal nominals which may refer to the patient of the verbal action or the instrument with which it is performed – but not to the agent. Thus the form kajil, from kajil “to fish” may mean “a catch of fish” or “a fishing-rod” – but not, for instance, “fisherman” (Burenhult 2002 :106). Lhasa Tibetan has different relativising affixes for different types of arguments, with (one of) the affix(es) for patients being identical to that for instruments (Comrie 2003). This type of categorisation suggests that the concept of “instrument” may be looked at from two different angles. In an event where an agent achieves an effect on the patient by means of an instrument, the instrument may be classified with the agent as “entities instigating the event”, as would seem to be the case in English, where instruments may be encoded as if they were agents. But alternatively, the instrument and the patient may be grouped together as “things the agent acts on”. The distinction may be clarified by means of a schematic representation of the Agent-Instrument-Patient event type (cf. e.g. Langacker 1991): (5.12) Agent 

  Instrument 

  Patient

In an event involving an instrument, the agent acts on the instrument, which in turn “acts on” the patient. Logically speaking, the instrument, which occupies an “intermediate” or mediating role in the event, might be conceived of as playing a similar role in the event as that of either of the two “endpoint” participants: it is similar to the agent in that it plays a role in the instigation of the act, but it is also similar to the patient in that it is being manipulated or, in a sense, affected, by the agent’s acting. Figure (5.13) schematically represents these two possibilities:

(5.13)





Agent 

  Instrument 

“things making the event happen” INSTIGATORS

1.

  Patient

“things the Agent does something to” AFFECTED ENTITIES

Other possible meanings are “an act of V-ing” or “location where V is performed”.



Prototypical Transitivity

Baker (1992) remarks on this dual nature of the instrument with respect to its role in an event by saying that “[s]emantically, the instrument is a kind of intermediate agent-theme. If I cut the bread with a knife, then I act on the knife, such that the knife changes location. The knife thereby acts on the bread such that the bread goes into a new state... the instrument is like the theme in conceptual structure in that both are acted on by the agent” (Baker 1992 :28). If we assume instruments to be [+Affected] by virtue of being manipulated by the agent, we can not only define instruments as opposed to Agents and Forces in our system, but we are also able to capture the similarity between Instruments and Patients which is reflected formally in certain languages: these two argument types are both manipulated by another entity, and so they are both [+Affected]. An argument which is [–Volitional, +Instigating, +Affected], then, will be labeled an Instrument. The difference between such arguments and Forces then lies in that the latter is [–Affected], that is, it instigates the event entirely by means of its own inherent energy and is not manipulated by any external entity. DeLancey (1984) describes the difference between Forces and Instruments in terms of the notion of “ultimate cause” – that is, with Instruments there is another “underlying” cause, the entity manipulating the Instrument, whereas with Forces there is no such entity – a Force is the first identifiable cause of the event in question, whereas an Instrument is not. He illustrates the distinction with examples from the Athapaskan language Hare, where féku “gun” can be encoded as a transitive subject, but only in case it goes off spontaneously – i.e. if there is no other causing entity involved. If the gun is being fired by someone, it cannot be encoded as transitive subject – neither can gofį “axe” which cannot be conceived of as “acting” spontaneously and independently. (5.14) Hare (Na-Dene, Athapaskan; DeLancey 1984 :186–187): a. Féku hé ye-wéhxį gun with 3obj-killed ‘S/he killed him/her/it with a gun.’ b. Féku ye-wéhxį gun 3obj-killed ‘The/a gun killed him/her/it.’ c. John gofį hé yejai tá’enįse J. axe with glass broke.tr ‘John broke the window with an axe.’ d. *Gofį yejai tá’enįse axe glass broke.tr ‘The axe broke the window.’



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

Note that (5.14a) and (5.14b) cannot refer to the same situation – the (b) sentence can only mean that the gun went off spontaneously, in other words that it is the “first identifiable cause” of the event. (5.14d) is ungrammatical because an axe cannot be conceived of as triggering the event “by itself ”; there must always be an agent involved, and so the axe cannot be construed as the “first identifiable cause” (DeLancey 1984 :186–187). This analysis essentially implies that entities which are not first identifiable causes are manipulated by some other entity; in other words, they are affected as well as being involved in causing the event. As noted above, Rozwadowska (1988 :159) considers the [–Volitional, +Instigating, +Affected] feature combination an unlikely one, because she assumes it would refer to “an unconscious causation directed towards itself ” and denote “an individual that is a Patient and a Causer at the same time, and which is not an Agent”. However, there is no a priori reason why the causation in question should necessarily be directed towards the instigating entity itself. Just because the features of instigation and affectedness cooccur on the same entity does not necessarily mean that these are part of the same causal event. On the contrary, this analysis corresponds perfectly to the view of instruments as intermediate entities in a chain of causal events which is found in the work of several linguists (e.g. Croft 1991, Langacker 1991). An instrument is in fact involved in two separate, though connected, instances of causation: the agent’s causing movement or change in the instrument, and the instrument triggering an effect on the patient. In other words, the “unconscious causation” of the instrument is not “directed towards itself ”, but towards the patient, while the affectedness registered on the instrument derives from a different causal event, that of the agent’s acting on the instrument. It is this intermediate role in a causal chain that gives the instrument the properties of being “a Patient and a Causer at the same time”, in fact a rather accurate description of a participant being manipulated for the purposes of causing an event. 5.3.4 [+VOL, –INST, –AFF]: Frustrative The other feature combination missing from Rozwadowska’s system is that of [+Volitional, –Instigating, –Affected] – that is, a participant which is volitionally involved in some state of affairs but does not actually instigate anything. Such a participant does not appear to correspond to any of the traditionally recognised “thematic roles”, and may seem like an unlikely candidate for a linguistically relevant category – a specifically “non-doing” participant. However, there are some languages which recognise a category of participants which are volitionally involved in that they want or attempt to instigate an act, but are unable to or prevented from carrying out the act, so that no actual instigation

 Prototypical Transitivity

takes place. Such participants take formal encoding different from that of regular transitive subjects, for example oblique case-marking: (5.15) Hindi (Indo-European, Indic; Mohanan 1994 :152): a. Ravii-ne Raam-ko pii aa Ravi-erg Ram-acc beat.pfv ‘Ravi beat Ram.’ b. Ravii-se Raam-ko pii aa nahññ gayaa Ravi-inst Ram-acc beat.pfv not go.pfv ‘Ravi couldn’t (bring himself to) beat Ram.’

In the Tibeto-Burman language Meithei, also known as Manipuri, the accusative suffix –bu which occurs, among other things, on animate patient objects, can be used on subjects of negated clauses in order to emphasise the fact that the participant in question was not able to carry out the action due to circumstances not under his control (Bhat and Ningomba 1997 :112): (5.16) Meithei (Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman; Bhat and Ningomba 1997 :112) a. Layrik-si әy-nә pa-d-ri book-this I-nom read-neg-nfu ‘I did not read this book.’ b. Layrik-si әy-bu pa-d-ri book-this I-acc read-neg-nfu ‘I did not (have not been able to) read this book.’

The meaning of the oblique-subject construction in these instances is not just that of not doing something, but of not being able to do something – the participant wants to act but for some reason is not able to carry out the action. Such participants then are [+Volitional], but [–Instigating]. In Kiowa (Kiowa-Tanoan, Watkins 1980), spoken in Oklahoma, USA, verbal prefixes cross-reference the core participants of a clause. For transitive clauses there are two main types of prefixes (the third option, the “mixed:object” type, will be excluded from this discussion as it is irrelevant for the present purposes). One, the “agent:object” type, is used for situations involving two participants, an obligatorily animate agent and an object. The other, the “patient:object” type, involves a minimum of two explicit participants, one non-agentive (that is, the patient) and a third person object, as well as an implied agent. This kind of situation is exemplified by the sentence ‘I gave them to you’, where ‘them’ would be the object and ‘you’ the patient, a formal category which “encompasses several non-agentive animate roles: dative, beneficiary, possessor, and experiencer” (Watkins 1980 :144).



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

A number of verbs obligatorily require the “patient:object” prefixes, and among them are “verbs of inability” such as ‘fail to hit’ and ‘be unable’ (Watkins 1980 :185). In other words, arguments that are unable to perform an action are treated as “patientive” rather than agentive. Malayalam (Dravidian, India) marks subjects of verbs with the “potential” affix –aam with the dative rather than the unmarked nominative case, signalling that the dative-marked participant is physically able or permitted to do something. While this is not a case of a participant being prevented from doing something, it nevertheless represents an entity which has the volition or the ability to perform an act, but is not in the present instance presented as actually doing something; this might also be considered a kind of [+VOL, –INST, –AFF] participant: (5.17)

Malayalam (Dravidian, Southern; McAlpin 1976 cited in Blake 2001 :147): Avalkku avane itikkaam she.dat he.acc can/may hit ‘She can hit him.’

Similarly, in Tsez (Nakh-Daghestanian), a transitive verb with the “potential” suffix – takes the oblique “possessive” case (so called because it also marks the possessor in sentences corresponding to e.g. ‘John has a book’): (5.18)

Tsez (Nakh-Daghestanian, Daghestanian; Comrie 2004 :117): K’et’u-q ay a u-ł-xo cat-poss milk.abs drink-pot-prs ‘The cat can drink the milk.’

The same case-marker is used to mark nonvolitional agents, in contrast to canonical Agents which take the ergative case: (5.19) Tsez (Comrie 2004 :117–118): a. Už-ā č’ikay y-exu-r-si boy-erg glass.abs II-break-caus-pstwit ‘The boy broke the glass’ b. Uži-q č’ikay y-exu-s boy-poss glass.abs II-break.pstwit ‘The boy (accidentally) broke the glass.’

Shibatani (1985) notes the formal link between passives, reflexives and potential constructions in a number of languages such as Spanish, Russian, and Japanese, though most of the examples given are with intransitive verbs and so may not be directly parallel to those cited above. The link between potentiality and formally detransitivising constructions is nevertheless interesting.

 Prototypical Transitivity

It seems, then, that languages do in fact sometimes distinguish participants which are volitional and noninstigating from regular agents which are volitional instigators. As there is no conventionally used term for this category, I will call such a participant a “Frustrative”, defined as a [+Volitional, –Instigating, –Affected] participant. 5.3.5 [–VOL, –INST, –AFF]: Neutral The category defined by the value ‘–’ for all three properties represents a participant which is not directly involved with the event either in terms of participating in its instigation or in registering its effect. As a consequence, it is a fairly diverse category, including a number of participant types commonly recognised as semantically distinct. Nevertheless, their common semantic specification in terms of our three basic properties is reflected in their formal encoding in a number of languages. This category essentially corresponds to what Rozwadowska (1988) calls “Neutral”: an argument which neither controls nor is affected by the event. More precisely, it corresponds to Rozwadowska’s “Neutral viewed as a mere object rather than a cause”, cf. the table in (5.1). A Neutral argument in Rozwadowska’s model can in fact be either + or – Cause (= Instigating), since “control” in her definition appears to denote “sentience” plus “cause”, that is, volition plus instigation. However, in 5.3.2 above I took the feature combination [–VOL, +INST, –AFF] to describe a force or other nonvolitional instigating participant, which is not in full control of the event but nevertheless contributes to its being brought about. I will therefore adopt Rozwadowska’s term Neutral, but reserve it for participants which are [–Volitional, –Instigating, –Affected]. There are various ways in which objects can be presented as unaffected by an action; the action may not be conceived of as having any direct effect on its object (e.g. John entered the room; John loves Mary), the clause may be negated so that no actual effect is produced (John didn’t hit Mary; see 5.6.2 below), or the object may be presented as relatively unaffected compared to other, highly affected objects (see 3.2.5). The stimulus argument of experience clauses is one type of argument which is not normally conceived of as affected by the event in question. Example (3.7) showed that Finnish treats objects which are construed as nonaffected or less affected as distinct from highly affected objects, marking them with the partitive rather than the accusative case. The stimulus arguments of (some) experience verbs pattern with the nonaffected objects, taking partitive case: (5.20)

Finnish (Uralic, Finno-Ugric; Sands and Campbell 2001 :290): Rakasta-n hän-tä love-1sg 3sg-part ‘I love him/her.’



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

Samoan similarly marks nonaffected or less-affected objects in the same manner as stimulus of experience, distinctly from highly affected objects: (5.21) Samoan (Austronesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian; Mosel and Hovdhaugen1992 :108, Duranti 1997 :195) a. Sā ‘ai e le teine le i‘a past eat erg art girl art fish ‘The girl ate the fish.’ b. Sā ‘ai le teine i le i‘a past eat art girl loc art fish ‘The girl ate some (of the) fish.’ c. E fiafia le teine i le i‘a pres like art girl loc art fish ‘The girl likes (the) fish.’

Many other languages also mark at least some stimulus arguments differently from Patients (for a discussion on the semantics and case-marking of different types of experiencer verbs, see chapter 8). Thus in Japanese, the object of ‘like’ takes the nominative case, rather than the accusative case used on affected objects; the result is a “double-nominative” construction (cf. 8.3): (5.22) Japanese (Isolate; Shibatani 1982 :105, Iwasaki 2002 :90): a. Tanaka ga Nakamura o naguru Tanaka nom Nakamura acc beat ‘Tanaka beats up Nakamura.’ b. Taroo ga Hanako ga sukida Taroo nom Hanako nom like ‘Taroo likes Hanako.’

In other words, many languages distinguish a class of “nonaffected objects” which includes stimulus arguments as well as various other types of objects not directly impinged on by the event in which they are involved. Although it may seem intuitively odd, another type of role which is likely to belong in the Neutral category is the so-called effected or resultative object, that is, objects which come into being as a result of the action decribed by the verb. Such verbs have sometimes been taken to belong to the prototypical transitive class, e.g. by Testelec (1998); but in fact their crosslinguistic behaviour suggests otherwise. For example, Van Valin and LaPolla (1997) group such verbs together with “verbs 2. le tama ‘the boy’ in the original example (Duranti 1997:195) has been replaced by le teine to maximise similarity with the other examples.

 Prototypical Transitivity

of consumption” (ingestive verbs) in the class of activity verbs with accomplishment uses (see 4.5), as they show similar types of formal alternations such as, in English, indefinite object deletion (see chapter 6). Hopper (1985) demonstrates a number of different ways in which effectedobject verbs behave differently from what he calls affected-object verbs (verbs with regular Patient objects which undergo a change of state) with respect to highly transitive constructions. For instance, English phrasal verbs with ‘up’, which tend to denote total affectedness of the object and therefore a high degree of transitivity, are only possible with affected-object verbs. For a verb like ‘cut’, the acceptability of the phrasal verb with ‘up’ depends on the affected- vs. effected-object reading of the verb. If something is being produced through the cutting, the phrasal verb is inappropriate, but if something is only being affected by the cutting, the phrasal verb construction is perfectly felicitous: (5.23) English (Hopper 1985 :69): a. He cut the meat. b. He cut up the meat. (5.24) English (Hopper 1985 :70): a. He cut a slice of cake. b. E* He cut up a slice of cake.

(“E*” means “ungrammatical with an effected-object reading”; (5.24b) is grammatical if taken to mean that an already existing slice of cake was cut to pieces). Similarly, in German, the transitivising prefix be- forces an affected-object reading for verbs which might otherwise take either affected or effected objects: (5.25) German (Hopper 1985 :77): a. Er malt ein Bild ‘He’s painting a picture.’ b. Er bemalt ein Bild ‘He paints over a picture.’

(5.25b) can only mean that an already existing picture is being covered in new paint, whereas (a) might equally well (and perhaps most naturally) refer to the production of a new picture. Hopper argues that the property which makes effected objects different from affected objects is that they are nonreferential, as they do not exist before the action described by the verb is brought about. The terminological contrast between “effected” and “affected” objects further suggests that such effected/nonreferential objects are not conceived of as affected in the usual sense; in the words of Hopper, effected objects “cannot be said to ‘undergo’ the action of the verb, and therefore cannot be described as Patients” (Hopper 1985 :69). This analysis is supported by restrictions on cleft sentences in English, which allow affected but not effected objects:



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

(5.26) English (Hopper 1985 :72): a. What he did to his autobiography was tear it up. b. *What he did to his autobiography was write it.

Writing something is not construable as “doing something to something” because prior to the act of writing, there is no existing object one might “do something” to. In other words, effected objects are not perceived of as undergoing a change of state because there is no object to which an initial state might be ascribed – they are not affected in the usual sense of the term. Effected objects, then, fit the semantic specification of the Neutral category. A language which appears to treat effected objects in a formally similar way to other types of Neutrals, such as the stimulus of experience events, is Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin has a construction known as the “b -construction”, in which an object noun phrase is preposed to the verb (normally it is in postverbal position) and marked with the preposition b . Not all object NPs are eligible for this construction, however. They must generally be definite or generic, that is, their reference must be known to both speaker and hearer; and they must be “disposed of ” through the verbal action (Li and Thompson 1981 :468) – that is, they must be affected. Objects that are not somehow affected by the action are not permitted in the b -construction, even if they are definite. The stimulus argument of experiencer verbs, for example, cannot occur in this construction: (5.27) Mandarin (Sino-Tibetan, Chinese; Li and Thompson 1981 :466–467): a. W b chá – bēi nòng – pò le I b tea – cup make – broken pfv/crs ‘I broke the teacup.’ b. *Tā b xiao māo ài 3sg small cat love ‘S/He loves the kitten.’

With respect to this construction, effected objects pattern like stimulus objects: they are unacceptable with , even if they are definite (cf. also Hopper 1985 :76): (5.28)

Mandarin (Li and Thompson 1981 :468): *Tā b gē chàng le 3sg b song sing pfv/crs ‘S/He sang the song.’

As Li and Thompson point out (1981 :468), the meaning of verbs like ‘sing’ does not imply “dealing with or handling their direct objects, but creating them”; and so the objects of these verbs pattern with other kinds of nonaffected objects.

 Prototypical Transitivity

The b -construction historically derives from a construction with a verb meaning ‘take’ – its original meaning would have been something like ‘take X and do Y to it’ (see Lord 1993 for a discussion of the development of serial verb constructions with verbs meaning ‘take’ into grammatical object markers). This naturally explains why effected objects cannot occur in such constructions – since they do not exist prior to the act of producing them, such an act cannot be described in terms of ‘taking the object and then doing something to it’. But this is exactly the reason why effected objects do not in general occur in highly transitive constructions – they cannot be conceived of as “undergoing a change of state” because they are not in any “state” to begin with. Even if the initial state is taken to be something like “a state of non-existence”, there is, by definition, no actual object to which this state can be ascribed, and therefore effected objects cannot be construed as “undergoing a change of state” – in other words, they are not seen as affected in the usual sense. Affectedness is, of course, both a gradable property and partly a question of perspective. The Finnish examples in (3.7), for example, contrasted strictly speaking not affected vs. unaffected objects, but highly affected vs. less affected objects. There is no objective criterion for how “unaffected” a participant must be to be considered a Neutral – indeed, this is likely to vary between languages. The main point is that languages tend to group together participants which are seen as relatively unaffected. As will be apparent from the above discussion, a broad range of semantically quite diverse role-types can be considered to qualify as Neutral. A reason why this category appears less semantically coherent than most of the others – and possibly less formally coherent as well – may simply be that it is the only category which is entirely negatively defined; the only thing its members have in common is being neither volitional, nor instigating, nor significantly affected. Obviously, participants categorised here as Neutral may have other semantic properties which fall outside of the feature system under discussion here, and which may lead to their being treated as different within the grammar of a given language. As noted above for the Volitional Undergoer category, the categories defined by the three-term feature systems are meant to represent the basic, crosslinguistically relevant distinctions with respect to the grammatical property of transitivity. It stands to reason that transitivity is not the only concept relevant for clause encoding in any given language, and so additional semantic factors may be reflected in the encoding of participant types in individual languages. The assumption being argued for here should be understood as the following: from a general crosslinguistic perspective, the basic distinctions which languages make between different types of arguments and different degrees of semantic transitivity can be adequately captured in terms of our three features; that is, volitionality, instigation and affectedness are at the basis of verb-argument relations across languages, and the catego-



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

ries defined by these features represent relevant crosslinguistic generalisations with respect to such relations.

5.4 Semantic features in verb subcategorisation The above discussion described how various types of core arguments may be described in terms of feature combinations which deviate to a greater or lesser extent from the transitive prototype represented by the argument types [+VOL, +INST, –AFF] (Agent) and [–VOL, –INST, +AFF] (Patient). What has not yet been clarified, however, is how these categories relate to the semantic properties of verbs. As discussed in 3.2.4, the relations between verbal lexemes and the arguments they combine with have traditionally been conceptualised in terms of thematic roles. We saw that from a theoretical point of view, a problem with the notion of thematic roles is that it gives rise to a great deal of confusion concerning the category of agent, which can nevertheless be shown to be relevant for the adequate description of grammatical phenomena in a number of languages. From a descriptive point of view, the general problem with the thematic-role concept is that it is too inflexible and hence leads to unnecessarily complicated analyses of reasonably simple linguistic facts. In this section I will argue that the description and analysis of verb-argument relations can be considerably simplified by abandoning the notion of thematic roles and focusing instead on the individual semantic features which define the different argument types discussed above. The problem with thematic role theory is the absolute correlation it assumes between a verbal lexeme and the semantic properties of its arguments: a given verb must be taken to always subcategorise for the same set of thematic roles, and this leads to difficulties for verbs which seem to be compatible with several different role-types. A verb such as English break, for instance, may take a volitionally instigating subject argument, an agent: John broke the window (on purpose). However, the property of volitionality is not actually required; break may equally well take a nonvolitional subject argument (John accidentally broke the window), an inanimate force (The bolt of lightning broke the window) or even an instrument (The hammer broke the window). In the light of these data, which thematic role should one postulate for the subject argument of break? Some of the attempts to resolve this question were discussed in 3.2.3. Notably, Van Valin and Wilkins (1996) base themselves on data such as those just presented to argue for the notion of agency as a pragmatic implicature arising from the combination of an “Effector” role (“the dynamic participant doing something in an event”) with a human participant which might be acting volitionally; volitional agency is ascribed to human effectors in the absence of evidence to the contrary.

 Prototypical Transitivity

Thus the verb itself only subcategorises for an effector, but this argument is interpreted as an agent if the properties of the participant in question make it likely that it is acting volitionally. The same assumption is made in Van Valin and LaPolla (1997), where it is claimed that “agent is in effect an overlay over other, more basic thematic relations” (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997 :118). As was noted in 3.2.6, it is not unusual to find such postulations of multiple thematic roles for a single argument. The necessity for such multiple role assignment derives from the inflexibility of the thematic-role concept: if a verb is expected to always subcategorise for the same thematic roles but turns out in actual fact to be compatible with several different semantic classes of arguments, a possible way to account for this is by postulating one fairly general, “basic” thematic role which is common to all instances of the verb’s use, and then adding “extra” roles on top of this role to account for the variation. The intuition is that there is some semantic “core” common to all arguments that may combine with a verb in a given syntactic slot, and that variation is found only in certain properties which occur in addition to this semantic core. The problem with postulating combinations of thematic roles, however, is that it further weakens the restrictions on a theory which is already rather fuzzy around the edges; not only is there no general agreement as to precisely which inventory of thematic roles is necessary for language description or analysis, but in addition one would need a clear and justified notion of which roles may be combined and how many different roles can be ascribed to a single argument – without any clearly stated restrictions on such combinations, the theory would ultimately be able to explain just about anything. Another aspect of an analysis in terms of combinations of roles is that it raises the question of precisely what thematic roles are. The roles are supposed to represent “the semantic relations between a predicate and its arguments” and “express the participant relations in the state of affairs denoted by the verb” (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997 :113). As such, thematic roles are essentially specifications of properties ascribed to participants when they combine with certain verbs. But if each role represents a possible cluster of participant properties, what is the status of a combination of roles? If more than one role is assigned to an argument, should this be taken to mean that the argument in question bears more than one distinct “semantic relation” with the verb? Are several “participant relations” involved? Thematic roles represent clusters of semantic properties which define the relation of a verb to its arguments. The problem has traditionally been to specify exactly the properties which characterise these relations. But even assuming that a relevant set of properties can be established, the even more basic problem of thematic-role theory is that it assumes verb-argument relations always to be defined by a certain cluster of properties, which is called a thematic role. A verb will, for instance, subcategorise for either a volitional instigator (an agent) or a nonvoli-



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

tional instigator; when a verb is compatible with either of these types, it leads to the kind of confusion discussed above. The simplest solution is not to postulate combinations of thematic roles, but rather to go in the opposite direction: to describe verbal subcategorisation not in terms of prepackaged clusters of properties (“roles”), but rather in terms of values for individual properties. The intuition behind Van Valin and Wilkins’ description of a verb such as break as always taking an Effector, which is sometimes also an Agent, is a very simple one: this verb specifically subcategorises only for an instigating argument, but is compatible with either value for the parameter of volitionality. In other words, the best way to approach the problem of verbs being compatible with several different types of participants (in the case of break, Agents, Forces, or Instruments) is to assume that verbs do not subcategorise for roles or argument types, but rather for feature values. Crucially, verbs need not specify a value for all the features which define argument types – that is, volitionality, instigation, and affectedness – but rather may require a specific value for one or two of the features, and leave the remaining feature(s) unspecified. The transitive verb break in English, then, only requires of its subject argument that it be [+INST]; it is compatible with any values for the remaining features. The consequence of this subcategorisation requirement is that any argument type which includes the value [+INST] in its feature specification may function as subject of this verb, which gives the following possibilities: Agent: [+VOL, +INST, –AFF] – John broke the window (on purpose) Force: [–VOL, +INST, –AFF] – John broke the window accidentally; The bolt of lightning broke the window Instrument: [–VOL, +INST, +AFF] – The hammer broke the window

In principle, the verb should even be compatible with an Affected Agent ([+VOL, +INST, +AFF]), if there is a way of construing the subject argument as being affected by the action, though this appears to be difficult for break in English. What the subject position of this verb is definitely not compatible with, however, is any argument specified as [–INST], that is, Frustrative, Volitional Undergoer, Neutral, or Patient (though see 5.6.2. below). This analysis accounts in a simple manner for the behaviour of the English transitive verb break. Verbs with stricter subcategorisation requirements must then be taken to specify an explicit value for more than one feature. Thus, for instance, there are verbs in English, though not very many, which do specify the volitionality of their subject arguments; murder is such a verb, which must therefore be taken to subcategorise for a [+VOL, +INST] argument. This is generally interpreted as meaning that murder specifically requires an Agent subject, though

 Prototypical Transitivity

there are contexts where it may in fact be compatible with an Affected Agent, in clauses such as John murdered for the money (see chapter 6). The different types of restrictions on transitive subjects found in other languages and discussed in chapter 3 and in 5.3 above can be similarly accounted for by positing different combinations of feature values in the verb’s subcategorisation entry. For languages such as Hare which allow Forces but not Instruments as subjects of transitive verbs, this is captured by assuming that these verbs subcategorise for [+INST, –AFF] subjects; this specification includes Agents ([+VOL, +INST, –AFF]) and Forces ([–VOL, +INST, –AFF]), but excludes Instruments which are [+AFF]. In languages where only Agents are permitted as subjects of transitive verbs, these verbs would subcategorise for fully specified values for all three features: [+VOL, +INST, –AFF]. To summarise, verbs can be analysed as subcategorising for values of individual semantic features, and may leave the value for one or more features unspecified. This approach allows for a more flexible account than one requiring subcategorisation to refer to fixed combinations of feature values, also known as thematic roles. It also provides for simple generalisations across types of arguments with respect to the feature values that they share – it is possible to refer, for instance, to the class of “instigating arguments” – that is, the argument types which have the value [+INST] in their semantic specification and which are therefore possible candidates for the subject position of most transitive verbs in English. An additional advantage to this analysis, combined with the model of prototypical semantic transitivity presented in chapter 3, is that it gives a simple and concrete content to the notion of “lexical transitivity”: on this account, a transitive verb is simply one which is compatible with the schema in Table 1 (3.2.6), that is, one which may take an Agent and a Patient argument. Note the formulation “compatible with”; there is no requirement that a transitive verb must occur with an Agent and a Patient at all times, since the properties of participants may also be influenced by context and other factors present in the clause, see below. But the contribution of the verb to the degree of transitivity of a clause must be taken to lie in its subcategorisation features: if the verb specifies one or more feature values which deviate from the prototype in 3.2.6, it is not fully transitive lexically, which may lead to a less than fully transitive clause. It should be emphasised that this is a crosslinguistic generalisation, and that the prototype nature of the concept of transitivity naturally entails that individual languages may treat as formally transitive verbs which, by this definition, are not transitive semantically. For example, there are certainly languages where affectedagent verbs such as ‘eat’ behave identically to prototypically transitive, Agent-Patient verbs. However, this is a property of the transitive construction in the language in question, rather than of the semantic definition of the transitive prototype.



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

Affected Agents are semantically very similar to Agents and share both of the positive defining features of Agents; they are [+VOL] and [+INST], and so fairly readily categorised as a “kind of ” agent. However, the fact that some languages choose to subsume under the formally transitive construction some instances which deviate to some degree from the semantic transitive prototype does not render the prototype invalid; indeed, the basic characteristic of a prototype is exactly that a category may include members which are more or less good examples of their kind.

5.5 Properties of argument NPs Transitivity is more than verbal semantics. As noted in 2.2.2, and in the introduction to this chapter, a number of factors are recognised to influence the encoding of two-participant clauses, including certain properties of the argument noun phrases, and grammatical properties of the clause as a whole (see 5.6). The main properties of argument NPs usually taken to be relevant for transitivity are animacy and definiteness/specificity/referentiality, often grouped together under the label individuation. They were discussed in 2.3, where the term “distinctness of participants” was first introduced; animacy and definiteness contribute to the distinctness of participants insofar as the participants are required to be distinct not just from each other, that is, in a conceptual or semantic sense, but also distinct from the background in that both are conceived of as independent entities worthy of individual attention. However, there is much to suggest that properties of individuation can also be construed as influencing the Agent-Patient opposition directly; that is, properties of the argument NPs may be relevant for the potential of a participant to exhibit the semantic properties defining the Agent and Patient categories, or for the extent to which it is typically construed as having these properties. The most obvious example is the relationship between animacy and volitionality; under normal circumstances, inanimate entities cannot be construed as volitional, and therefore inanimate participants cannot fill any of the roles specified as [+VOL]. This means, for example, that clauses with inanimate A participants necessarily deviate from the transitive prototype, as this A participant cannot be an Agent. Rather more complex is the manner in which the property of affectedness interacts with individuation properties such as definiteness, animacy and referentiality. It is important to bear in mind that affectedness is not only a relative notion but also a subjective one – what matters for linguistic encoding is the extent to which an entity is assessed by speakers as more or less affected. This raises the question of exactly how affectedness is to be measured. If a given language uses one type of formal encoding for “more affected” entities and a differ-

 Prototypical Transitivity

ent one for “less affected” entities, how do language users determine what counts as more or less affected? Affectedness is not only an abstract notion but a complex one; different events affect their participants in radically different ways (contrast for example ‘paint the house’ with ‘destroy the house’, or for that matter ‘build the house’). Across all possible event types and participants, how does one make a decision as to which participants should be encoded as “affected” and which not? Apart from the manner and degree of affectedness inherent in the semantics of a given verb, it is conceivable that inherent properties of a participant may influence the degree to which the participant is judged to be affected by the event. One way of assessing and grading affectedness is through part-whole relations. A cup with only its handle broken off is clearly “less broken” than one which is completely smashed to bits; in general, an entity where only a subpart is affected is seen as less affected than an entity which is affected as a whole. In order to express such partial affectedness of entities we often resort to linguistic expressions of indefiniteness. We will say, for instance, I drank some milk to express the affectedness of only a subpart of the available milk; the milk would imply affectedness of the whole rather than of a part. Similarly, We killed a pig is generally interpreted as meaning that there were several pigs and that only one of them, a subpart of the whole, was subjected to being killed; the pig would mean that the only available pig was killed, that is, the totality rather than a part would be affected. In other words, expressions of definiteness are used as expressions of total affectedness. The relationship is an indirect one mediated by properties of language, since only linguistic entities – noun phrases – may be definite or indefinite, not actual objects in the world. Thus the actual, physical pig is no less affected in the situation described by We killed a pig than in that described by We killed the pig; however, in the former case the pig is presented as the only affected part of a larger whole, and the degree of affectedness inherent to the situation as a whole is therefore construed as being lower. In other words, entities presented as being definite are presented as embodying a greater degree of affectedness than entities presented as indefinite; or, to put it in a somewhat simpler manner, definite entities are construed as more affected than indefinite ones. Related to the notion of definiteness is that of referentiality, a term which refers to the relationship between a linguistic expression and the world. A noun phrase is referential if it picks out an existing entity in the world, that is, if it refers to an actual object. Thus, the noun phrase a sandwich may be interpreted as referential in the clause I ate a sandwich, since there must have been a particular entity which was the object of my eating; but it is nonreferential in I want a sandwich (on the most natural reading), since my wanting does not direct itself at some particular bread-and-butter object, but applies equally to any physical or hypothetical entity which might be designated with the word sandwich.



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

Referentiality is relevant for affectedness for the simple reason that nonexistent or hypothetical objects cannot be affected – if a noun phrase functioning as object of a verb does not refer to any specific entity, then there there is no way to observe any effect of the action on this object, since there is no unique real-world entity to be examined for such an effect. Referentiality is therefore a prerequisite for affectedness. It is on this basis that effected objects are not considered as being affected in the prototypical sense (Hopper 1985). Effected objects are “nonreferential” in the sense that the object they refer to did not exist before the action was undertaken. Affectedness is typically understood as “undergoing a change of state”; however, one cannot predicate a change of state of a nonexistent object. It has been claimed that “coming into existence” constitutes a change of state (e.g. Dowty 1991 :574). However, such claims confuse two different conceptual levels. Something “coming into existence” constitutes a change of state in the world; the world is in a different state before and after the event. However, it does not constitute a change of state in the object in question, because something that does not exist cannot undergo any change of state: there is no entity to which one can ascribe an “initial state” (of non-existence, presumably) which would then “change” into the state of existence. By virtue of being nonreferential, therefore, effected objects cannot be described as being affected; it is on this basis that I have assigned effected objects to the class of Neutrals in 5.3.5 above. It appears that animacy, too, may be relevant for the degree to which a participant is construed as affected for the purpose of grammatical marking. This is because we perceive the effects of actions through human eyes, and effects on certain types of entities are more salient to human perception and interests, and more likely to arouse our empathy. Thus, Mithun (1999 :21) writes of the Hokan language Central Pomo: “The criterial feature of affectedness limits the class of potential grammatical patients. Only human beings (or personified animals), those with whom the speakers may emphatize, are ever cast as grammatical patients.” In other words, language encodes events from a human perspective, and for human beings, things that happen to other human beings carry more interest than things that happen to other animates or to inanimate objects; effects on humans are more salient than effects on non-human animates, which are again more salient than effects on inanimates. In a sense, then, we perceive humans or animates as more affected than inanimate entities, even when the actual event they are involved in is the same (see Næss 2004 for more discussion). Inherent properties of argument noun phrases, then, can be understood as influencing the semantic properties relevant to transitivity defined through the opposition between a semantic Agent and Patient: indefinite or inanimate entities are typically perceived as less affected, and indeed indefiniteness can be employed

 Prototypical Transitivity

as a grammatical means of indicating the partial affectedness of an entity. The effect of inherent properties of argument NPs on semantic transitivity can therefore ultimately be understood in terms of a reduction of the semantic opposition between Agent and Patient.

5.6 Clause-level properties 5.6.1 Clausal operators as “feature-switchers” Yet another factor recognised to influence the overall transitivity of a clause is that of operators at clause level, specifically negation, mood (realis vs. irrealis) and aspect. The influence of such factors on transitivity has generally been characterised in somewhat impressionistic terms such as an action being “less effective” when it is presented as negated, irrealis, or as ongoing as opposed to concluded (Hopper and Thompson 1980 :252), a vagueness which to a large extent derives from the lack of an overall understanding of precisely what “transitivity” means, discussed above. The notion of maximal semantic distinction provides a more precise way of characterising the effects of clause-level properties on the transitivity of a clause. From this perspective, clausal operators function as “feature-switchers”: as far as their contribution to the overall transitivity of a clause is concerned, the function of these factors is to change the values of certain of the semantic features characterising the participants. In this way we can analyse such clause-level factors as operating on the maximal distinction of participants, and so explain their influence on formal transitivity in the same terms as other relevant factors. 5.6.2 Negation and mood I argued above that a verb subcategorising for a [+INST] subject is compatible with Agent, Force and Instrument subjects, in the right context even with Affected Agents, but never with the [–INST] categories Frustrative, Experiencer, Neutral or Patient. On the level of lexical subcategorisation this holds without question, but in the context of a clause it requires a crucial modification: it is true for positive, declarative clauses. A verb like ‘break’ may refer to the instigation of a certain event with a certain effect; but when negated, it no longer refers to the instigation of anything, and presumably, as a consequence, does not refer to any perceivable effects either. The question then is, if the subject argument of John broke the window is an Agent, defined as [+VOL, +INST, –AFF], then how do we characterise the subject of John didn’t break the window, which does not actually instigate anything?



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

In terms of the feature-decompositional definitions of participant types laid out in 5.3, the obvious answer would be that it is in fact a Frustrative – [+VOL, –INST, –AFF] – since the +INST feature no longer holds. This is intuitively quite reasonable in that it seems unnatural to speak of participants as “agents” when there is no actual event that they could be agents of; if John didn’t “do anything”, he is not perceived as “agentive”. The analysis captures this intuition quite straightforwardly by stating that an argument which is not [+INST] is by definition no longer an Agent, but a Frustrative. Furthermore, this analysis explains why negation may have an impact on the transitivity of a clause (cf. example 3.6): if the subject of a negated clause is a Frustrative rather than an Agent, then there is no longer maximal semantic opposition between its arguments, and the clause is therefore less semantically transitive. As far as its contribution to the transitivity of a clause is concerned, then, we can conceive of negation as an operator changing the value of certain features of the arguments in the clause, with a consequent reduction in the semantic opposition between these arguments. The question is then which features are influenced by negation in this way. It is fairly obvious that this depends on the semantics of the verb in question, since the precise semantic effect of negation is dependent on the nature of the event whose occurrence is negated. It also seems clear that negation, by its very nature, can only change a positive value to a negative one, not the other way round; negating a semantic feature essentially comes down to changing its value from ‘+’ to ‘–’. If the verb subcategorises for a [+INST] subject, then this feature must be taken to change under negation; an event which does not take place is not instigated. A verb with an Agent subject in a positive clause, then, takes a Frustrative when negated, as argued above. A sentence like John didn’t break the glass is at least compatible with the reading that John chose not to break the glass, that is, he volitionally refrained from breaking the glass – so the [+VOL] feature is not changed. If John’s volition is not taken to be involved – for example, if he accidentally dropped the glass but fortunately this did not result in the glass breaking – then he would not have been an Agent in the corresponding positive clause (John (accidentally) broke the glass) but rather a Force ([–VOL, +INST, –AFF]). Under negation, such an argument would become a Neutral ([–VOL, –INST, –AFF]), that is, an argument which is neither in control of an event nor directly affected by it. This also makes sense semantically – the fact that the glass did not break is not attributed to any property of John’s; he is not perceived as having any control over the outcome of the situation. Nor is he affected by the situation in any direct way – he is simply an incidental participant, necessary for the situation to take place the way it did but not directly influencing it or being impinged on by it in any way. Such a non-controlling, nonaffected argument is precisely what we have referred to as a Neutral.

 Prototypical Transitivity

An Instrument subject – [–VOL, +INST, +AFF] – would under negation be characterised as a Patient – [–VOL, –INST, +AFF]. This is in fact a rather accurate description of the type of situation in question. Consider the sentence The ball didn’t break the window, where a ball was kicked at a window, but the window did not break. Then the ball has not in fact participated in the instigation of any event, but has only been subjected to being kicked – it is purely an affected entity, that is, a Patient. The most common instance of verbs subcategorising for [–INST] subjects are verbs of experience, whose experiencer arguments are defined as [+VOL, –INST, +AFF] (Volitional Undergoers). Since negation can only change feature values from + to –, the INST feature must here remain unchanged. Rather, negation in this case changes the value of AFF. In a sentence like John loves Mary, a certain emotional state is being predicated of John, which we are taking to mean that John is affected by a certain emotion. Under negation, it is precisely this affectedness of the A argument which is being negated; John doesn’t love Mary is a statement to the effect that John is not in this particular emotional state with respect to Mary, thus he is [–Affected]. In experience clauses, then, negation operates on the AFF feature, and the resulting argument is [+VOL, –INST, –AFF] – a Frustrative. In fact, negation has an effect on the AFF feature in other instances as well, although not necessarily in the specification of the A argument. In the sentence John broke the glass, the arguments are respectively, [+VOL, +INST, –AFF] (John) and [–VOL, –INST, +AFF] (the glass). However, under negation (John didn’t break the glass), not only is the subject no longer instigating, but the object is no longer affected – an event which is not instigated and therefore does not take place, cannot either produce an effect on any entity. In addition to changing the subject argument from an Agent to a Frustrative, therefore, negation also changes the object from [–VOL, –INST, +AFF] – Patient – to [–VOL, –INST, –AFF], that is, a Neutral. We can illustrate the effects of negation on various types of clauses as follows, then: (5.29) Feature changes under negation a. Agent → Frustrative, Patient → Neutral: John broke the glass (on purpose) +VOL –VOL + INST –INST –AFF + AFF

John didn’t break the glass (refrained from breaking it) + VOL –VOL –INST –INST –AFF –AFF



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

b.

Force → Neutral, Patient → Neutral: John broke the glass (accidentally) –VOL –VOL + INST –INST –AFF + AFF



John didn’t break the glass (uncontrolled) –VOL –VOL –INST –INST –AFF –AFF

c.

Instrument → Patient, Patient → Neutral: The ball broke the window –VOL –VOL + INST –INST + AFF + AFF



The ball didn’t break the window –VOL –VOL –INST –INST + AFF –AFF

d.

Volitional Undergoer → Frustrative, Neutral → Neutral John loves Mary + VOL –VOL –INST –INST + AFF –AFF



John doesn’t love Mary + VOL –VOL –INST –INST –AFF –AFF

The Neutral argument in the experience clause does not change under negation, simply because it is defined entirely by negative feature values; there are no positive values to negate. As these examples show, the effect of negation with respect to the feature specifications of the arguments of a clause is to reduce the semantic distinction between the arguments. As a result of this, negation reduces the transitivity of the clause. The effects of the mood parameter – realis vs. irrealis – are in fact very similar to those of negation: An event which is presented as not occurring, or as occurring only hypothetically or under non-real circumstances, cannot be conceived of as actually being instigated, or as having any effects on actually observable entities.

 Prototypical Transitivity

Mood, therefore, functions similarly to negation in reducing the semantic opposition between arguments, and thereby the overall transitivity of a clause. For discussion of the connection between irrealis mood and negation, see Miestamo (2005). 5.6.3 Aspect The correlation of aspect with transitivity is interesting in that it may function in both directions. On the one hand, languages with explicit morphological aspect marking may show differences in other properties of the clause co-varying with the aspect marking, so that clauses marked for perfective aspect show a highly transitive case-marking pattern or other structural features associated with high transitivity, while clauses marked for imperfective aspect similarly show structural features associated with low transitivity. This is the case for instance in Kalkatungu, where the difference between perfective and imperfective aspect in (5.30) is accompanied by a change in case-marking, from ergative-absolutive in the perfective clause to absolutive-dative in the imperfective: (5.30) Kalkatungu (Australian, Pama-Nyungan; Blake 1976 :286): a. Kupa uru-tu caa kalpin lai-na old.man-erg here young.man hit-past ‘The old man hit the young man.’ b. Kupa uru caa kalpin-ku lai-mina old.man here young.man-dat hit-ipfv ‘The old man is hitting the young man.’

Alternatively, markers of low transitivity, for instance non-canonical case-marking, may lead to a difference in the aspectual interpretation of the clause, such as in Finnish: (5.31) Finnish (Fromm and Sadeniemi 1956 cited in Hopper and Thompson 1980 :262) a. Liikemies kirjoitti kirjeen valiokunnalle businessman wrote letter.acc committee.to ‘The businessman wrote a letter to the committee.’ b. Liikemies kirjoitti kirjettä valiokunnalle businessman wrote letter.part committee.to ‘The businessman was writing a letter to the committee.’

In both these cases, the general correlation is between perfectivity and high transitivity on the one hand, and imperfectivity and low transitivity on the other, though in Kalkatungu it is the imperfective aspect which triggers the low-transi-



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

tive case-marking, whereas in Finnish the low-transitive case-marking triggers the imperfective reading. In both languages, however, perfective clauses are clearly construed as more transitive than imperfective ones. The perfective-imperfective contrast is variously described in terms such as bounded vs. unbounded, complete vs. noncomplete, or non-reference to the internal temporal structure of the situation vs. explicit reference to such structure (see discussion in e.g. Comrie 1976 :16ff). The perfective is taken to present the situation in question as a delimited whole, whereas the imperfective presents it “from the inside”, as an ongoing process. The concept of delimitedness is closely associated with that of affectedness, as argued in Tenny (1994) and discussed in chapter 4. The limit or endpoint of an event is essentially defined in terms of its effect; for example, an act of breaking something has reached its endpoint when some object has reached the state of being broken. This means that, as far as differences in transitivity are concerned, the perfective-imperfective distinction can be described as a difference in the parameter of affectedness: a perfective clause describes a complete situation, including its effects, whereas the corresponding imperfective only refers to the act itself, viewed as a process, and does not include any effects which this process may eventually achieve. In the terminology of Chung and Timberlake (1985), in an imperfective clause the effect of the situation is “outside the event frame” and is neither referred to nor necessarily entailed. In other words, in a two-argument clause, perfective aspect presents the O argument as [+AFF], while an imperfective presents it as [–AFF], at least in the sense that it does not explicitly entail anything about its affectedness. The effect of aspect on transitivity, then, is that of manipulating the AFF feature; the O of a perfective clause is [+AFF], and the clause is therefore more transitive than an imperfective clause, where the value [–AFF] on the O constitutes a reduction in the maximal opposition of arguments and therefore renders the clause less transitive.

5.7 Formal correlates We have listed three possible sources of deviations from the transitive prototype, in the sense of factors which may influence the values in a given clause of the semantic features defining this prototype: verbal semantics, properties of argument NPs, and clause-level operators, most notably negation and aspect. All of these were argued to be able to influence the values of the features ±VOL, ±INST, or ±AFF of the arguments of the clause, and therefore to reduce the semantic opposition between these arguments.

 Prototypical Transitivity

There are languages where a single morphosyntactic device is used to signal changes in transitivity originating from any of these three sources, suggesting that all these types of transitivity deviations in fact have a similar semantic effect. Perhaps the most well-known of these is the partitive case in Finnish. The Finnish partitive has a number of functions, some of which have been illustrated in preceding sections. It is obligatory with the objects of a number of verbs such as rakastaa ‘love’ in (5.20) above; it indicates partially affected objects as in (3.7); it alternates with the accusative case with a number of verbs resulting in the aspectual alternation illustrated in (5.31); it is used with indefinite bare plural or mass-noun objects; and it is used on objects of negated verbs or of expressions of doubt (Kiparsky 1998, Sulkala and Karjalainen 1992). What all these constructions have in common is that they take Neutral objects – that is, they all deviate from the transitive prototype in that their O argument is [–AFF] rather than [+AFF]. In the case of ‘love’ and similar verbs this feature is specified at the level of verb semantics – the verbs describe events which do not have any direct effect on their objects. The property of indefiniteness on the object has the same effect on the level of NP properties, as described above – indefinite objects are construed as less affected than definite ones. And negation and aspect are clause-level properties which affect the [AFF] feature on the object – objects of events which do not take place cannot be affected, and imperfective aspect does not include affectedness of the object in its description of a situation. The claim made in 5.3.5 above that nonaffected objects are marked with the partitive case in Finnish, then, holds regardless of the level of structure at which the [–AFF] feature is assigned: lexically, through inherent NP properties, or at the level of the clause. This analysis provides an answer to the question of how partitive marking on the object NP can be interpreted as signalling imperfectivity, a verbal property (Kiparsky 1998 :266): The basic function of the partitive case is to signal the presence of the feature value [–AFF] on the object. However, there are a number of different ways in which this feature value may be assigned. In most cases, it will be clear from structural or semantic properties of the clause which particular source this nonaffectedness should be ascribed to: if the clause has a verb whose semantics predicts a [–AFF] object, if the clause is negated, or if the object is or can be interpreted as indefinite or “quantitatively indeterminate” (Kiparsky 1998 :266). However, if the nonaffectedness of the object cannot be ascribed either to verbal semantics, inherent NP properties, or the clause-level properties of negation or mood, then there is only one possible source left for it, namely aspect. Subsequently, the clause acquires an imperfective reading. A similar set of meanings as that found with the partitive in Finnish also occurs with the imperfective aspect in Russian and a number of other Slavic languages. Although these languages employ verbal rather than nominal morphology



Chapter 5.  Transitivity in verbs and clauses 

for the expression of these meanings, the underlying semantic function is essentially the same, namely the assignment of the feature [–AFF] to the O argument. The fact that this feature assignment can originate on different levels of structure is what gives rise to the three-way ambiguity of (5.32b): (5.32) Russian (Indo-European, Slavic; Kiparsky 1998 :272): a. On napisa-l pis’m-a he write.pfv-past.m.3sg letter-pl.acc ‘He wrote the letters.’ b.

On pisa-l pis’m-a he write.ipfv-past.m.3sg letter-pl.acc (1) ‘He wrote (some) letters.’ (2) ‘He was writing letters.’ (3) ‘He was writing the letters.’

The imperfective aspect in (5.32b) is interpreted as indicating that the object is [–AFF]. However, this feature might conceivably have been assigned at either of two levels: that of NP properties, or that of clause-level operators – in this case, aspect. If the [–AFF] feature is interpreted as originating at the level of NP properties, we get interpretation (1) – that is, the fact that the object is [–AFF] is seen as a consequence of its being indefinite. (As ‘writing some letters’ must be understood as referring to a series of acts of letter-writing, it might be argued that clauselevel properties such as habituality or iteration are to a certain extent relevant even here.) If the feature [–AFF] is interpreted as originating strictly at the level of clausal operators, we get reading (3), where the nonaffectedness of the object is attributed to the clause being imperfective. However, these two sources of [–AFF] feature assignment are not mutually exclusive – it is perfectly possible for a clause to have both imperfective aspect and an indefinite object – and so we also get (2) as a possible reading, where both of the properties potentially responsible for the object being [–AFF] are taken to be present. We see that the link between imperfective aspect, negation, indefiniteness and “partitivity”, in the sense of partial affectedness of objects, is not simply a matter of all these things being “low-transitive” properties. The similarity is of a much more concrete kind: these properties all influence transitivity in the same way, namely by assigning the feature value [–AFF] to the O argument. That languages should employ the same formal means to encode all these properties is therefore not at all surprising.

3. Since aspectual alternations do not change inherent lexical meaning, I assume that aspect marking cannot be interpreted as a signal of lexical feature assignment.

 Prototypical Transitivity

5.8 Conclusion In order to understand “what transitivity is”, we must understand not only which semantic properties tend to be characteristic of a formally transitive clause, but also why just these properties should be seen to influence the encoding of a clause as more or less transitive. The puzzle of why such diverse properties as aspect, negation and the degree of individuation of the O argument all play a role in what appears to be the same grammatical phenomenon receives an explanation within the analysis of transitivity as ultimately referring to the distinctness of the participants involved. All the properties typically recognised as relevant to the concept of transitivity can be understood as influencing the semantic opposition between participants which is an essential prerequisite for their being maximally distinct; some of them are also relevant for participant distinctness in the wider sense, as involving both semantic distinction and a high degree of individuation on the part of both participants. It seems likely, therefore, that this is the unitary semantic concept which has been missing from earlier accounts: the distinctness of participants is at the core of the notion of transitivity, and all lower-level “transitivity properties” can be understood as contributing in some way to this distinctness, either by requiring both participants to show a high degree of individuation or by contributing to the maximal semantic distinction between Agent and Patient.

chapter 6

Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion

6.1 Introduction The grammatical concept of transitivity, though generally accepted to be a complex notion most appropriately applied at the level of the clause rather than strictly that of the individual verbal lexeme, is nevertheless inextricably linked with the notion of verbal valency, which refers to the number of overt argument NPs a verb is required to combine with in a grammatically acceptable clause. Valency is essentially a property of verb forms, since different forms of a verbal lexeme may have different valencies – the active vs. passive forms of basically transitive verbs being a case in point (Mosel 1991b). Nevertheless, at a more abstract level valency can be assigned as a property of lexemes, since the number of alternative valencies different forms of the same lexeme may show is a function of the various grammatical processes the lexeme in question may undergo. A crucial factor in clause-level transitivity is obviously the valency of the verb in the clause, since the number of participants encoded in the clause is a central component of even a complex notion of clausal transitivity such as that discussed in the preceding chapters. I argued in chapter 5 that transitivity on a lexical level can be understood as the ability of a verb to combine with two arguments which conform to the semantic specifications of Agent and Patient, respectively. A trivial prerequisite for this is the ability to combine with two arguments at all, as opposed to just one. The fact that a verb can combine with two arguments, however, does not necessarily mean that it always does. Traditionally, verbs have been classified into those which require only one argument NP (“monovalent” or “intransitive”) and those which require two (“bivalent”, “transitive”) or three (“trivalent”, “ditransitive”). However, there are verbs which do not fit neatly into these pigeonholes, but appear to conform to the requirements of both the monovalent/intransitive and the bivalent/transitive class: they are fully grammatical with a single, “subject” argument, grouping in this respect with the intransitive verbs, but they may equally well occur with a second, “direct object” argument, which is formally indistinguishable from the second argument of verbs that are unquestionably transitive in the sense that their second argument is obligatory. Such verbs have been called,

 Prototypical Transitivity

variously, “pseudointransitive”, “labile”, or “ambitransitive”, and their existence is fairly common crosslinguistically. Since the definition of a verb as “transitive” is usually based on its having two obligatory arguments, such verbs are difficult to account for in terms of traditional analyses of valency and transitivity. This chapter will discuss how the understanding of transitivity as referring to the distinctness of participants can shed some light on the problems of “ambitransitivity”. It will argue that the two phenomena often lumped together under this label, “S/A ambitransitivity” or indefinite object deletion, and “S/O ambitransitivity” or inchoative/causative alternations, are in fact two qualitatively different phenomena which require distinct explanations. Indefinite object deletion is of particular interest with respect to the current model of prototypical transitivity, since it is most frequently attested with so-called verbs of consumption and creation (e.g. Van Valin and LaPolla 1997 :111–112) – in other words, two semantic classes of verbs which deviate from the transitive prototype as defined in 3.2.6: affectedagent verbs and effected-object verbs. That is, indefinite object deletion is intimately associated with reduced semantic transitivity. Below, I will demonstrate that the omissibility of direct object arguments is not by its nature a lexical phenomenon, as the terms cited above arguably imply. Rather, the possibility of employing a basically two-argument verb without an overt direct object is a function of a property which may equally well arise at the level of the clause as at that of the lexicon: reduced semantic transitivity with respect to the prototype. By contrast, so-called S/O ambitransitivity is a genuinely lexical phenomenon, a case of two semantically similar and homophonous verbs with different valencies. This difference between the two phenomena explains certain otherwise rather puzzling patterns of alternation (6.4).

6.2 Indefinite object deletion 6.2.1 Defining the term In this chapter, the term “indefinite object deletion” (IOD) will be used to describe the situation where a verb which allows an argument which syntactically must be characterised as a direct object is employed without any overt direct-object argument. We will restrict the discussion to cases of so-called context-independent object deletion. Many languages allow omission of objects whose reference is expected to be retrievable from context. Such context-dependent object deletion may take place when the object in question has already been mentioned in the previous discourse, or where the general context provides sufficient clues as to the identity of the ob-



Chapter 6.  Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion 

ject, or where the hearer from other cultural or linguistic clues is expected to be able to assign a reference to the missing object. By contrast, context-independent object deletion does not depend on the referent of the missing object being retrievable or identifiable by the hearer. In order to correctly understand a sentence such as He is eating, it is not necessary to be able to infer what is being eaten; in fact, there is no expectation whatsoever that the referent of the object should be identifiable. This is not to say that the use of the verb eat without an object does not imply that an object is present; the act of eating unquestionably presupposes that something is eaten. However, it is only this presence of an object in general that must be inferred by the hearer in such cases: the hearer knows that something is being eaten, but is not expected to be able to identify which specific edible object is being referred to. It is object deletion in this second sense – context-independent object deletion – which will be discussed in the following. The distinction between context-dependent and context-independent object deletion is not necessarily always easy to draw, but we will focus on cases in which it is fairly clear that context plays little or no role in interpretation. I will use the term “indefinite object deletion” or “IOD” to refer to the use of a verb without an overt object, where the semantics of the verb implies that some object is present, but where the specific referent of the omitted object is not expected to be retrievable from context. The term “indefinite object deletion” derives from the fact that such omitted objects must always be interpreted as indefinite. It is not possible to omit an object which in the context is clearly specified as definite – one cannot in response to the question What happened to my sandwich? reply *Fido ate (Fillmore 1986 :97), cf. also 4.3.1 and 4.5. Some approaches assume a further division between contexts where objects are omitted because they are obvious and contexts where they are omitted because they are indefinite. For example, Heath (1976a) claims that in the sentence He drinks, “the T[ransitive] O[bject] is deleted because it is obvious in the context, rather than because of indefiniteness. On the other hand, in the type Speed kills the deleted TO is indefinite rather than obvious”. It is not clear, however, how the object of He drinks can be “obvious in the context” when the sentence is in fact presented without any context whatsoever. The only way to interpret this would seem to be that the object is “obvious in the context of deletion”, that is, it is obvious because it is deleted; the very fact that no object is present allows us to assign it the “obvious” interpretation. But this is a circular argument: the object is deleted because it is obvious, and it is obvious because it is deleted. No such difference between “obvious” and “indefinite” deleted objects will be assumed here. The particular interpretation of objectless ‘drink’ found in English and many other languages will be discussed in 6.3.3 below.

 Prototypical Transitivity

6.2.2 Typical IOD verbs Indefinite object deletion is typically taken to be a lexical property of verbs or classes of verbs. This assumption is prompted by the fact that IOD crosslinguistically is particularly frequent with a fairly small set of verbs, which can be subgrouped into rough semantic classes. The first of these classes is verbs of ingestion, which are commonly assumed to represent the core set of IOD verbs (Marantz 1984, Van Valin and LaPolla 1997) These verbs are certainly among the most commonly cited cases of IOD in English, and indeed it is very common for ‘eat’ verbs crosslinguistically to undergo IOD, cf. 4.3.1. For most languages for which I have been able to find data, it is the case that if they allow indefinite object deletion with any verb, they allow it with ‘eat’ (and usually also ‘drink’). Thus, in Malayalam (Dravidian, India), u uka ‘eat’ may occur either with or without an object (Asher and Kumari 1997 :106); Imonda (Trans-New Guinea, Papua New Guinea) allows object deletion “apparently absolutely freely” for verbs such as ne ‘eat’, kse ‘fuck’ and heulõ ‘hear’ (Seiler 1985 :149). Korean (isolate, Korea) shows IOD at least for mekta ‘eat’, nolta ‘play’, and cata ‘sleep’ (which occurs with the cognate object naccam ‘a nap’ in its transitive use) (Sohn 1994 :311), while Tamazight Berber (Afro-Asiatic, Morocco) allows it for among others /c/ ‘eat’, /sird/ ‘wash’, and /štab/ ‘sweep’ (Johnson 1966 :46). Tondano (Austronesian, Indonesia), includes kaan ‘eat’ and koo ‘drink’ among the verbs which may freely omit their objects (Sneddon 1975 :95), as does Kambera, another Austronesian language of Indonesia, where the forms are ngangu ‘eat’ and unung ‘drink’ (Klamer 1998 :147). Central Yup’ik (Eskimo-Aleut, Alaska) includes in its set of “ambivalent” verbs nere- ‘eat’ and mer- ‘drink’ (Woodbury 1981 :288), and Bāgandji (Pama-Nyungan, Australia) allows IOD with d=ayi- ‘eat’ and wīdja‘drink’ as well as gulba- ‘speak’ (Hercus 1982 :183). In Godoberi (Nakh-Daghestanian, Russia), the verb ‘eat’ has suppletive intransitive and transitive alternants, while udi ‘drink’ may omit its object in the perfect with the reading ‘be drunk’, and has a reduplicated form u udada meaning ‘drink alcohol regularly’, parallel to English objectless drink (Kibrik 1996 :116). In chapter 4, I explained the frequent omissibility of the object argument of ‘eat’ and semantically similar verbs in terms of such verbs taking an Affected Agent argument: since the effect on the A participant can be construed as the endpoint of the act of eating, the patient is of secondary relevance, and may be omitted. Indeed, many of the languages which may omit the objects of ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ also include in their set of IOD verbs other verbs denoting events which affect their agents or their A participant. Another example given for Malayalam in Asher and Kumari (1997) is vaayikkuka ‘read’, another act having an effect on its agent. Im-



Chapter 6.  Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion 

onda kse ‘fuck’ is clearly also an act involving an affected agent, while heulõ ‘hear’ takes an experiencer, similarly an affected A argument. Tondano and Tamazight ‘wash’ has a reflexive meaning when used intransitively, a meaning which crucially involves affectedness of the agent (cf. 4.4.2). Kambera and Central Yup’ik both show IOD for a number of experiencer verbs (Kambera ita ‘see’, rongu ‘hear’, ma.rombang ‘forget’ and others; Yup’ik tangerr- ‘see’, uyangte ‘peer down (into)’). However, there is another type of verb which are crosslinguistically common in IOD constructions, which do not fall under this explanation as their agent participant is not typically affected, namely verbs with effected objects, discussed in 5.3.5. As noted there, an effected object is one that comes about as a result of the verbal action; it did not exist before the action began, nor does it come into existence if the action is interrupted before it is completed. If someone is, for instance, writing a letter but is interrupted before they finish, we cannot say that a letter has been produced. There is less crosslinguistic data available for these verbs than for the affectedagent verbs, but at least some of the languages cited above as allowing IOD with affected-agent verbs also allow it for some effected-object verbs. Thus IOD is found in Tondano with verbs like wilit ‘sew’ and lutu ‘cook’ (Sneddon 1975 :95), and in Kambera with tinung ‘weave’ (Klamer 1998 :147). Many languages allow IOD with verbs of speech and sound emission, which are counted among the effected-object verbs by Hopper (1985 :73–74). Tondano shows IOD also for cantar ‘sing’, Kambera for pa.banjar ‘chatter/talk’ and pa.áu(ng) ‘call’, Bāgandji for gulba- ‘speak’, and Godoberi for among others b=ali ‘shout, call’, u uki/ u udi ‘whisper’, and ami ‘whistle’. As pointed out in 5.3.5, a crucial feature of effected objects is that they are nonreferential. However, nonreferentiality is not in itself a sufficient condition for IOD, since any verb can in principle take a nonreferential object, without this object being omissible as a result. The problem is, of course, that once an object is omitted there is, for most verbs, no way of knowing whether it should be understood as referential or not. The unique property of effected-object verbs is that nonreferentiality of the object is inherent to the semantics of the verb itself; that is, the use of the verb itself indicates that the object is nonreferential and therefore less prominent in the discourse context, less distinct from the general background, and not affected in the usual sense. Note that IOD with such verbs is most felicitous in grammatical contexts presenting the act as ongoing, and consequently, the object as not yet completed: I am/was writing. By contrast, in perfective contexts, where the object must be understood as having been completed, and therefore referential, omission is all but impossible:??I have written,??I have baked. (Compare these to the very common perfect use of objectless eat: I have eaten; cf 6.3.3). That is, in order to be omissible, the object must not only be clearly nonreferential,

 Prototypical Transitivity

but this nonreferentiality must be implicit in the semantic and grammatical properties of the verb itself. The property shared by the omissible objects with affected-agent and effectedobject verbs is a relatively low degree of distinctness. We saw in chapter 4 that Patient participants of affected-agent verbs are not maximally distinct from the Affected Agent, and that they are omissible because the Affected Agent may itself be construed as the endpoint of the event, by virtue of being affected. Effected objects are nonaffected and nonreferential, and therefore show a low degree both of distinguishability from the Agent and distinctness from the general background; this low degree of distinctness makes them highly susceptible to omission. 6.2.3 Clausal-level IOD As IOD is most typically found with certain semantically specifiable classes of verbs, most attempts at analysing it have focused on the semantic properties of individual verbs or verb classes. However, Goldberg (2001) demonstrates that lexical semantic factors are not the only properties which may license IOD. Goldberg shows that “causative verbs”, that is, verbs causing a change of state in their objects, are perfectly felicitous without an overt object in certain specific contexts, despite claims from a number of researchers (e.g. Grimshaw and Vikner 1993, Brisson 1994, Rappaport Hovav and Levin 1988) that the patient argument of such verbs must always be expressed. She quotes the following examples of indefinite, nonspecific patient arguments of causative verbs being omitted: (6.1)

Object omission with causative verbs, Goldberg (2001 :506): a. The chef-in-training chopped and diced all afternoon. b. Tigers only kill at night. c. The singer always aimed to dazzle/please/disappoint/impress/charm d. Pat gave and gave, but Chris just took and took. e. These revolutionary new brooms sweep cleaner than ever. f. The sewing instructor always cut in straight lines.

None of the verbs in (6.1) are normally considered to allow IOD (cf. *The chef chopped; *Tigers kill, etc.), but clearly the contexts in which they are presented in these examples make object omission possible. All these examples designate either iterative (6.1a, d) or generic (6.1b, c, e, f) actions, and Goldberg demonstrates that iteration seems to be a controlling factor for IOD: a basically causative action which is construed as iterative can be described with an objectless sentence (Scarface killed again), but one that is construed as an isolated occurrence cannot (??Pam killed yesterday).



Chapter 6.  Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion 

There are several facts to be accounted for, then. IOD clearly is not a property of specific verbs or verb classes only, since certain grammatical contexts can license it for just about any verb. At the same time, it is clearly much more common with some verbs than with others, both within a single language such as English, and crosslinguistically. A satisfactory analysis needs to account for both of these aspects, ideally in terms of the same basic properties. Most attempts at tackling IOD, however, have focused primarily on one or the other aspect of this complex problem. 6.2.4 Previous approaches Quite a lot has been written about IOD, especially in English where it is a fairly common phenomenon. As mentioned above, most accounts treat IOD as a lexical phenomenon, that is, as a problem of verbal valency: some verbs cannot be conclusively classified as either intransitive or transitive, but may occur either in a transitive syntactic frame with a subject and a direct object, or in an intransitive frame with only the subject overtly expressed. Two main proposals have been made as to how to integrate such verbs into a broader theory of valency in general: either the “intransitive” and the “transitive” variants of a verb are counted as two different lexical entries with different argument structures, or the lexemes in question have as part of their lexical entry that an indefinite direct object need not be overtly expressed. The problem, then, becomes one of identifying the set of verbal lexemes which have the property of being able to participate in this “alternation”, and, if possible, providing a semantic characterisation of the verbs belonging to this set. As Marantz (1984 :192) puts it, “it is an interesting and important problem to characterize the transitive verbs that permit indefinite object deletion”. Marantz assumes the ingestive verbs, of which he gives ‘eat’, ‘drink’, and ‘learn’ as examples, to be the core candidates for IOD, recurring in language after language. In other instances, he claims, “the alternation is created not by a productive lexical rule but by generalization by analogy with certain core verbs exhibiting the alternation” (Marantz 1984 :193). Assuming that it is possible to give a semantic characterisation at least of a “core set” of verbs allowing IOD, such a characterisation does not, however, in itself constitute a satisfactory analysis of the phenomenon. The act of describing a set of entities which may enter into a particular grammatical construction or process only raises the rather more interesting question of how to explain why just these and not other entities have this distribution: why would having particular semantic properties make a verb eligible for indefinite object deletion? Fillmore (1986 :98) apparently considers providing such an explanation for English IOD to be infeasible: “There are certain semantic groupings of predicates that allow... complement omission, but a genuine semantic explanation does not

 Prototypical Transitivity

appear to be forthcoming”. Partly on the basis of the observation that certain verbs take on “restricted meanings” in the IOD construction (the examples in question will be discussed below in 6.3.1 and 6.3.3), he assumes IOD in English to be lexically conditioned and restricted to a fairly limited set of verbs: “In English... conditions for the omission of non-subject complements are limited to particular lexically defined environments. The most commonly discussed of these is the object slot for such verbs as EAT, READ, SING, COOK, SEW and BAKE... which are understood as having, when used intransitively, an understood object roughly represented as the word STUFF” (Fillmore 1986 :95). Fillmore assumes that the ability to occur with what he calls Indefinite Null Complements (that is, “deleted” objects) is specified in the lexicon for each verb: “From the reality that omissibility phenomena of the sort discussed in this paper are tighly connected with specific senses of specific words, it seems unavoidable that (at least in these cases) closely related word senses must be listed separately in lexical entries” (Fillmore 1986 :106). Rice (1988) suggests that IOD is not a possibility specified in the lexical entry of a particular lexeme, but rather a function of the different ways in which the events denoted by certain verbs can be construed: “[C]ertain construals of transitive events are such that they focus on the active participant and leave the actedupon participant unspecified and, most importantly, to be filled in by a default value” (Rice 1988 :203). She argues that objects can be omitted when there is a default interpretation for a missing object, exemplifying this with ‘John ate a meal’ as the default interpretation for John ate. The verbs allowing such omission must be “semantically neutral”, not conflating action and manner (contrast John ate with *John nibbled), and the omitted object shows a “low degree of semantic independence from the verb” (Rice 1988 :204). Rice appeals to the notion of prototypical complement of a verb: there is, she claims, a basic-level NP which is evoked as the understood object when a verb is used without an overt object NP: “Clearly, an omitted object should not be read as zero. Rather, on a neutral reading, an omission activates a prototype or a particular semantic frame in which the action is prototypical” (Rice 1988 :204). This assumption is meant to account for the fact that the presence of an object is implied with IOD constructions, even though no specific reference is assigned to it. The notion of a prototypical complement, however, begs the question of how one determines, for a given verb, which possible complement is “prototypical”. One of Rice’s examples of such a verb is drink, which is assumed to have the prototypical complement ‘alcohol’. On this analysis, the fact that the English verb drink may be used without an object is a consequence of this verb having a prototypical object associated with it, and this prototypical object is recoverable from the objectless sentence, giving the reading of John drinks as John drinks alcohol. The question is, apart from the fact that objectless drink in English (and many



Chapter 6.  Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion 

other languages) has this reading, what is the evidence for alcohol being a prototypical object of drink? In the daily life of most people, a typical act of drinking does not involve alcohol, and it is not clear why such a specialised notion as that of ingesting intoxicating fluids should be “prototypical” with respect to the everyday concept of drinking things in general. Without any independent justification, such an assumption is circular: Object NPs may be omitted if they represent “prototypical complements” of the verb in question, and since in English objectless drink is generally interpreted as meaning ‘drink alcohol’, ‘alcohol’ must be the prototypical object of ‘drink’. Rather than focus on the relations between individual verbs and the types of objects they typically take, a number of approaches to IOD appeal to event-structure analyses along the lines of Vendlerian semantics. Mittwoch (1982) characterises intransitive ‘eat’ as an activity and transitive ‘eat’ as an accomplishment, thus supporting on event-semantic grounds the view that the two uses of ‘eat’ must on some level be analysed as involving two separate lexical items. Van Valin and LaPolla (1997) similarly assume a distinction between an “activity” and an “active accomplishment” reading of verbs such as ‘eat’, where the activity version has a nonreferential second argument which is not instantiated as a semantic macrorole in the verb’s logical structure, whereas the active accomplishment version has two macrorole arguments (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997 :148–150). Van Valin and LaPolla’s analysis of ‘eat’ was discussed in 4.5. In Brisson (1994), a case is made for two distinct classes of verbs permitting IOD (in Brisson’s terms, verbs allowing unspecified objects): “write verbs”, examples of which are write, knit, bake, draw, paint, sew, drink, type, dig, and eat; and “sweep verbs” such as sweep, plow, pack, dust, vacuum, clean, mow and rake – study and read are given in parentheses as atypical examples of this class because they behave like these verbs under some, but not all, conditions. In brief and somewhat simplified terms, Brisson’s argument is that the sweep verbs are not true accomplishment verbs (among other things, she argues that they do not necessarily entail a result state, and they can take adverbs of duration without acquiring an iterative reading) and that this accounts for their ability to occur without an overt object, a claim essentially parallel to that made for ‘eat’ by Van Valin and LaPolla to the effect that the second argument of activity predicates is qualitatively different from that of accomplishment predicates, and therefore omissible. The write verbs, on the other hand, are accomplishment verbs proper and therefore require a different account. However, Brisson is not able to provide such an account, beyond proposing that write verbs do not really “delete” their objects but rather have two distinct variants represented in the lexicon, one intransitive activity verb and one transitive accomplishment verb. With respect to the intransitive activity verbs, she discusses

 Prototypical Transitivity

whether there is not in fact an “implicit argument” present; does not John wrote seem to entail that he wrote something? However, she claims that this may not be relevant and that “the assumption that ‘something’ was written might be related to real world knowledge” (Brisson 1994 :99). The appeal to real-world knowledge appears rather ad hoc in this case, as it is not clear why this would apply only to the write verbs. If the assumption that something is written is attributable to real-world knowledge, why would the assumption that something is swept require a different analysis? If the interpretation of objectless clauses depends on real-world knowledge in some cases, could this not be generalised to all cases, making all further analysis superfluous? A further problem with this analysis is that it produces a complicated and rather vague account of the verb eat, which has traditionally been considered one of the most central instances of the IOD phenomenon. Eat in this account is classified with the write verbs, but behaves rather differently from the rest of this class when used intransitively: “monadic eat seems to strongly suggest that a meal has been eaten in the unmarked case: John ate means that he ate dinner, or lunch, or whatever may constitute a meal in John’s diet. This completive sense is in strong contrast to the monadic write verbs: John wrote does not have any such completive sense. However, it is still possible to obtain a “pure” activity reading for monadic eat, as in John ate for ten minutes. It is likely that monadic eat would have to be lexically marked to account for these properties” (Brisson 1994 :100). An analysis in terms of event structure, then, cannot account for the fact that a number of presumed accomplishment verbs are frequent in the IOD construction, beyond claiming that such verbs occur in two distinct lexical variants. It also has difficulties in accounting for the behaviour of ‘eat’ under IOD, which will be further discussed in 6.3.3. In a departure from the traditional approach based on verb semantics, Goldberg (2001) analyses IOD as essentially a discourse-pragmatic phenomenon. Her starting-point is the data presented in (6.1) above, which demonstrate that in the right context, just about any transitive verb in English can be used without an object. In order to account for these data, Goldberg introduces the notion of discourse prominence, which subsumes both topic and focus. An argument that is either topical or focal is discourse-prominent, and English generally requires discourseprominent arguments to be expressed. In the typical situation the patient argument of a causative verb is a highly prominent one (cf. 3.2.2); “one typically does not as1. In the analysis of Van Valin and LaPolla (1997), IOD verbs such as ‘write’ are not genuine accomplishment verbs but “activity verbs with accomplishment readings”. The difficulties with Van Valin and LaPolla’s analysis of two-argument activity verbs, which on their account are those which allow IOD, are discussed in detail in 4.5.



Chapter 6.  Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion 

sert that a participant changes state unless one wishes to discuss or draw attention to that participant” (Goldberg 2001 :510). Nevertheless, a patient of a causative verb which is neither topical nor focal, and therefore has low discourse prominence, may be omitted under the further condition that the action is emphasised. Emphasis on the action can take a number of forms; iteration, discussed earlier, is one possibility, but there are others. Goldberg among others mentions that the action can be the discourse topic, as in the example He was always opposed to the idea of murder, but in the middle of the battlefield, he had no trouble killing; or an action can be emphasised by the speaker’s strong affective stance toward the action, as in Why would they give this creep a light prison term? He murdered! Goldberg concludes that patient arguments can be omitted when they are deemphasised vis à vis the action. This leaves her with the cases of apparently lexically conditioned omission – the familiar “core set” of IOD verbs like drink, smoke, sing, bake, read, eat, which frequently omit their objects even when none of the above-mentioned trappings of “action emphasis” are present. She states that intuitively there does appear to be a stronger emphasis on the action in Pat read in the car than in Pat read a book in the car, but does not attempt to explain or substantiate this intuition. Instead, she notes that this set of verbs frequently appears in generic contexts with a habitual interpretation: Pat drinks; Pat smokes; Chris sings; Sam bakes. As this usage is licensed by her discourse-prominence analysis, she assumes that the frequent usage of these verbs in such contexts has led to a grammaticalisation of object omission as a lexical option for these verbs. There are two main difficulties with this analysis. Firstly, it is unclear exactly what the condition of “emphasis on the action” should be taken to include. There are instances where object omission is possible but where it is not clear that there is any intended emphasis on the action as such. In a sentence like John murdered for the money, no iteration is necessarily implied; John might perfectly well have committed just one murder for the purposes of financial gain. But neither does the action as such seem to be emphasised in any other way; if anything, the emphasis here seems to be on John’s motivation for performing the act in question rather than on the action itself, and in fact the NP specifying this motivation may take contrastive stress: John murdered for MONEY, not for love. This goes against Goldberg’s claim that emphasis on the action as such is required, rather than just the presence of some focal element other than the patient (p. 513). Secondly, the attempt to locate the properties licensing IOD exclusively at the level of discourse leads to a rather vague and unsatisfactory account of the instances where IOD does seem to be related to verbal semantics. There is no explanation for why just the sort of verbs cited by Goldberg (note that all of these are either affected-agent or effected-object verbs) should be so frequent in generic/habitual contexts as to grammaticalise the possibility of IOD. Furthermore, it is sim-

 Prototypical Transitivity

ply not true that all of these verbs are frequent in “generic contexts with a habitual interpretation”. The most frequently-cited IOD verb of them all, ‘eat’, is highly unnatural in a generic/habitual sentence: ??John eats. Similarly, the generic/habitual construction with drink only applies when drink is understood to mean ‘drink alcohol’; if taken to mean something like ‘John habitually imbibes liquids’, ??John drinks is just as peculiar as ??John eats. It is not obvious, therefore, how the proposed grammaticalisation of the possibility of IOD would have come about with these verbs; and the question also arises of exactly where the ‘drink alcohol’ meaning of objectless ‘drink’ comes from (see 6.3.3 below). To summarise this section, neither an analysis based entirely on verbal semantics nor one placing IOD exlusively at the level of discourse-pragmatics adequately accounts for all the facts of indefinite object deletion, even when only English data is taken into consideration. If IOD is to be seen as a unitary phenomenon, that is, if all cases of IOD are to be understood as being licensed by essentially the same semantic/pragmatic conditions, then these conditions must be able to apply both at the level of lexical semantics and at that of clausal properties. A plausible candidate would appear to be the prototype notion of transitivity, as described in the preceding chapters.

6.3 Transitivity and indefinite object deletion 6.3.1 IOD as a detransitivising mechanism We saw in the previous chapter how the semantic properties relevant to prototypical transitivity can be understood as being assigned at different structural levels; either that of verbal semantics, or through various aspects of grammar at the level of the clause. This insight was exploited to account for, among other things, the semantics of the Finnish partitive case and the Russian imperfective aspect. The same insight can be employed to account for the distribution of indefinite object deletion presented above, in terms of the notion of transitivity. Structurally, the most obvious characteristic of the indefinite object deletion construction is that it is a formally intransitive clause, as opposed to the transitive construction which appears when the verb in question is used with ano overt object NP. The logical explanation to such an alternation between higher vs. lower formal transitivity would be that it reflects a corresponding difference in semantic transitivity. From this perspective, IOD is most felicitously analysed not as a lexical quirk of certain specific verbs or classes of verbs, but as a syntactic detransitivisation mechanism, a means of expressing in a formally intransitive clause events which are construed as deviating from the transitive prototype. It can be licensed under



Chapter 6.  Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion 

a variety of superficially different conditions, but the property which links them all is that of reduced semantic transitivity with respect to the prototype. We have already seen that the semantic classes of verbs which typically undergo IOD share the property of reduced transitivity vis-à-vis the prototype, by virtue of a low degree of distinctness; Affected Agents are semantically closer to Patients than unaffected Agents, and effected objects are [–Affected] and nonreferential; all of these are properties which lead to lowered semantic transitivity as a result of the lowered distinctness of participants. The iterative and generic contexts cited by Goldberg as favouring IOD can be unproblematically analysed as instances of low transitivity. Iterative or generic statements do not describe a single instance of an action affecting a single patient, but rather a set of similar actions affecting different patients. In terms of Hopper and Thompson’s Transitivity criteria (see 2.2.2), the object for such clauses is less individuated, since it is not unique and specific; and the iteration or habitual occurrence of an action cannot be construed as a telic event proceeding towards a specific goal. By these criteria, then, iterative and generic clauses clearly represent a reduction in semantic transitivity with respect to the prototype, and as such they would be eligible for encoding as formally intransitive clauses – that is, without an overt object. Analysing IOD as a construction which applies only to verbs or clauses which are not fully transitive semantically explains a striking observation made by Fillmore (1986): certain verbs undergo what he calls a semantic “specialisation” when used in an IOD context. He cites the verb bake as an example: in the sentence I spent the afternoon baking, “the missing object is taken to include breads or pastries, but not potatoes or hams” (Fillmore 1986 :96). If we take into consideration the difference in semantic transitivity between affected-object and effected-object verbs, an explanation for this “semantic specialisation” is readily forthcoming. The verb bake in English is ambiguous between an affected-object (bake potatoes, where the potatoes already existed prior to the action and are only affected, not effected by the act of baking) and an effected-object reading (bake pastries, where the act of baking brings the pastries into existence). Affected-object bake is high in transitivity and so does not easily undergo IOD. Effected-object bake, on the other hand, unproblematically omits its object, because this verb has a nonreferential, nonaffected object and therefore is not fully transitive semantically. Consequently, under IOD, only the effected-object reading is possible – the intransitive construction can only be read as containing a verb relatively low in transitivity. Similar behaviour can be found e.g. with the ambiguous verb paint in generic/ habitual statements. If we say of someone that He paints, we mean that he paints pictures – either for a living or as a hobby – not that he is a housepainter. The in-

 Prototypical Transitivity

transitive construction excludes the affected-object reading but allows the effected-object one, just as in the case of bake. The IOD construction with a purpose clause – John murdered for the money – does not necessarily have an iterative reading, as pointed out above. Rather, such clauses are construable as a kind of affected-agent construction where the affectedagent reading is not imposed by the semantics of the verb, but rather by the purpose clause. A statement of the agent’s motivation or purpose in performing an act is essentially a statement of the benefits that the agent hopes to achieve in acting; in other words the intended effect of the act on the agent. Affectedness of the agent, then, is not necessarily inherent to the semantics of a specific verb, but may be introduced by other elements of a clause. Evidence from languages other than English further suggests a link between indefinite object deletion and a certain degree of reduced semantic transitivity. In the Austronesian language Tukang Besi (Indonesia), any underived two-argument verb may in principle undergo IOD. Thus, ’ita ‘see’ is lexically transitive in that it may take two overt NP arguments, but it is equally grammatical without an overt object: (6.2) Tukang Besi (Austronesian, Western Malayo-Polynesian; Donohue 1999 :70, 209): a. No-‘ita-‘e na kene-no te ana 3real-see-3obj nom friend-3poss core child ‘The child saw its friend.’ b. Sa-rato-no i iwo, no-‘ita when-arrive-3poss obl there:lower 3real-see ‘When she arrived there, she looked around.’

However, a number of derived transitive verbs do not conform to this pattern. Tukang Besi has a causative or “factitive” verbal prefix hoko-, with the meaning ‘do work in order to make completely (verb)’ (Donohue 1999 :208). This prefix contrasts with the “causative” pa- in that hoko- only occurs with intransitive verbs whose subject argument is semantically a theme/patient, and that with pa- “there is not such a complete irreversible change implied” (Donohue 1999 :211). Verbs derived with hoko- behave formally like underived transitive verbs in all respects except one: They do not allow indefinite object deletion. Thus, for instance, the derived verb hoko-mena ‘make hot’ = ‘heat’ is ungrammatical without an overt object: (6.3)

Tukang Besi (Donohue 1999 :209): * No-hoko-mena Ø 3real-fact-hot ‘They heated [ ] up.’



Chapter 6.  Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion 

Semantically, what characterises derivations with hoko- is a high degree of transitivity. Their causee argument, which functions as the object of the derived transitive, must be a theme/patient, and they denote a “complete change of state, usually of a permanent nature” in this object; and achieving this change of state “involves a degree of effort on the part of the causee” (Donohue 1999 :210), which implies a consciously acting agent. The hoko- prefix, then, essentially derives highly semantically transitive verbs, and the fact that the object of such constructions cannot be omitted is just what one would expect if indefinite object deletion occurs only in contexts of reduced semantic transitivity. In Yagua, a language of Peru, object omission is similarly only possible with verbs denoting events that are not fully transitive semantically. A verb like rícha ‘extinguish’, which causes a clear change of state in its patient argument, is infelicitous without an object argument even in habitual or iterative aspect, which in other cases facilitate IOD in Yagua. By contrast, a verb like jipátya ‘knock down’, which has a less radical effect on its O argument, unproblematically omits its object in a habitual clause, although object omission is less felicitous in clauses referring to just one single instance of knocking something down: (6.4) Yagua (Peba-Yaguan; Payne 1985 :34): a. Ray-jipátya-rà b. ?Ray-jipátya 1sg-knock.down-inanO 1sg-knock.down ‘I knock it down.’ ‘I knock down/I am knocking down.’ c. Ray-jipátya-sara 1sg-knock.down-hab ‘I’m always knocking (things) down.’ (6.5) Yagua (Payne 1985 :35): a. Sa-rícha-ra b. 3sg-extinguish-inanO ‘S/he extinguished it.’

?Sa-richa 3sg-extinguish ‘S/he extinguished.’

c. Sa-rícha-yąą-ra j ïdáy 3sg-extinguish-distr-inanO cooking.fire ‘S/he goes everywhere extinguishing cooking fires.’ d. ?Sa-rícha-y 3sg-extinguish-distr ‘S/he goes everywhere extinguishing.’

 Prototypical Transitivity

On the other hand, a verb like rúpąą ‘miss (a target)’ clearly has no effect whatsoever on its O argument, and may occur without an object even when referring to one single instance: (6.6) Yagua (Payne 1985 :33): a. Sa-rúpąą-maa-níí 3sg-miss-pfv-3sgO ‘S/he has missed him/her (i.e. the target).’ b. Sa-rúpąą-máá 3sg-miss-pfv ‘S/he has missed.’

Object omission in Yagua, then, seems to follow a kind of semantic transitivity cline: the more radically affected the object, the more difficult object omission becomes. Additional detransitivising factors such as habituality or iteration may facilitate IOD for some verbs; but strongly affected objects are not omissible even under such conditions. In fact, a similar effect can be observed for English. Consider the verb kill, by any account a very highly transitive verb, with an active and, in the default interpretation at least, controlling agent, and a radical effect on its patient. A generic objectless clause with a human subject is not particularly good for kill: *John kills, meaning that he habitually kills people or animals, is unacceptable in English, although for the reasons outlined above it may be improved by the addition of a purpose clause: John kills for the sheer thrill of it. However, with an inanimate and therefore necessarily nonagentive subject a generic objectless clause is unproblematic: Smoking kills. Note that both the generic reading and the inanimate subject are required for the object to be omissible; *Smoking killed is unacceptable. Similarly, negation (Hopper and Thompson’s transitivity parameter F) is not in itself sufficient to license object omission with English kill: *He doesn’t/didn’t kill. If an imperative (Hopper and Thompson’s parameter G, Mode) is added to the negation, however, the object can be omitted with a generic reading: Thou shalt not kill. These facts suggest that, in English as well as in other languages, the possibility for indefinite object deletion is directly linked to the degree of transitivity of the clause in question. Highly transitive clauses do not allow IOD; but the more factors reducing the transitivity status of the clause are added, the more the possibility for IOD increases.



Chapter 6.  Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion 

6.3.2 Additional factors Although an explanation in terms of deviations from the transitive prototype gives a unified account of the cases discussed above, it clearly does not present the whole story; both in English and other languages, additional factors beyond mere semantic transitivity can be seen to influence the possibility for IOD. One general restriction appears to be that IOD does not occur with verbs whose semantics includes elements which refer specifically to the manner in which the patient is affected. This explains the difference noted by Rice between what she calls a “semantically neutral” verb like eat, which omits its object without difficulty, and “action-plus-manner” verbs like munch or nibble. The difference between these two types of verbs is that the additional semantic features present with munch and nibble pertain to the specific effect of the action on the patient rather than the agent, and so these verbs do not function primarily as affected-agent verbs and therefore do not normally omit their objects. However, if it is possible to construe the meaning element in question as pertaining to the effect on the agent – that is, where the manner in which the action was performed is seen as having some kind of influence on the effect achieved on the agent – object omission is in fact possible: The dinner was delicious, but Jane had no appetite and only nibbled. A related restriction obtains with verbs which describe actions whose precise effects depend on the nature of their patients. Goldberg (2001) suggests that a verb like break generally does not omit its object because different things “break in very different ways and with very different consequences” (p. 512). That is, the precise nature of an event such as breaking depends on what is being broken, and the patient must therefore be specified, as it “supplies much of the relevant information” (Goldberg 2001 :512). Similarly, effected-object verbs such as build or make describe actions whose execution depends on the kind of object produced – building is a different process when what is being built is a skyscraper than when it is a treehouse or a sandcastle, and there is no generalised process of “making” independent of what is being made. Finally, it is clear that different languages show different restrictions on which verbs and constructions permit IOD. While most languages showing IOD appear to include affected-agent verbs in the set of verbs allowing it, not all languages extend it, for instance, to effected-object verbs. An example of this is found in Turkish, where IOD is unproblematic with affected-agent verbs (6.8), while effected-object verbs apparently require an overt object; if one wishes to use such a

 Prototypical Transitivity

verb without referring to a specific object, a dummy object must be inserted, e.g. yazı ‘writing’ in (6.7b): (6.7) Turkish (Altaic, Turkic; Lewis 1953 quoted in Allerton 1975:223) a. Babam, odasında mektuplarını yazıyor father.my room.his.in letters.his is.writing ‘My father is writing his letters in his room.’ b. Babam, odasında yazı yazıyor father.my room.his.in writing(-the) is.writing ‘My father is writing in his room.’ (6.8) Turkish (Kornfilt 1997:329): a. Hasan elma-yı ye-di Hasan apple-acc eat-past ‘Hasan ate an apple.’ b. Hasan ye-di Hasan eat-past ‘Hasan ate.’

The view of IOD as a syntactic detransitivisation mechanism entails that it might be expected to interact with other detransitivisation mechanisms of the language in question. One might hypothesise that a language with few or no morphological means of detransitivisation would make more use of IOD than a language with a wider range of formal means for indicating variations in transitivity. English, for instance, is a language with very little inflectional morphology and so limited means of expressing transitivity variations. Since there is no case-marking nor any form of verbal morphology – with the exception of passivisation, which constitutes a rather specialised form of detransitivisation – the main formal indication of transitivity in English is simply the presence vs. absence of an overt object – if there is an object in the clause, then it is transitive; if not, it is intransitive. In other words, IOD is more or less the only mechanism available for expressing reduced transitivity in English. A clause has to be either transitive – containing an object – or intransitive; there are few intermediate options. The only way to systematically mark clauses as less than fully transitive, therefore, is to encode them as intransitive – by omitting the object. This seems to me a plausible explanation for why IOD occurs as frequently as it does in English: it functions as a generalised detransitivisation strategy made available in cases where verbal or clausal semantics makes it desirable to encode the clause in some other way than as a canonical transitive. By hypothesis, other languages which do have other means of indicating variations in transitivity should make less use of IOD. It is, of course, known that not all languages allow such



Chapter 6.  Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion 

widespread use of IOD as English does; the question is under which circumstances different languages do and do not permit IOD. Unfortunately, a detailed crosslinguistic investigation into restrictions on IOD and its interaction with other detransitivisation mechanisms is beyond the scope of this study; but the perspective suggested here might be useful for future studies on the topic. On this analysis, IOD shows similarities to the process known as antipassivisation (cf. Heath 1976a), where a direct object is demoted to oblique status. In IOD, however, the object is not just demoted but simply omitted altogether, while no accompanying changes in the verb signal that a derivational process has taken place. The conditions under which IOD apply in many respects resemble those described for antipassives in e.g. Cooreman (1994) and Palmer (1994). Antipassive constructions are typically used in clauses with less directly affected or partially affected objects, indefinite objects, or with imperfective or iterative aspect; indeed, in many languages the O NP in an antipassive is not simply demoted but may be omitted altogether (Palmer 1994 :181–185). Cooreman suggests that the core function of the antipassive is to indicate “a certain degree of difficulty with which an effect stemming from an activity by A on an identifiable O can be recognized” (Cooreman 1994 :67); in other words, the antipassive is used when, for various reasons, the O is relatively low in distinctness. As with IOD, the exact criteria for the use of antipassives vary from language to language, but the general semantic conditions show great similarities crosslinguistically. 6.3.3 Semantic specialisation: The case of ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ A recurring question in discussions of IOD with ingestive verbs is not simply why such verbs so frequently undergo IOD, but also why the use of these verbs without an object tends to give rise to certain very specific readings. In the words of Fillmore, “EAT is used to mean something like ‘eat a meal’ – not merely ‘eat something’, and DRINK is used to mean ‘drink alcoholic beverages’” (Fillmore 1986 :96). It is this use that motivates Rice’s analysis of ‘alcohol’ as being somehow a prototypical object for drink, and it leads Fillmore to assume that IOD in fact comes in two distinct varieties, “one involving a semantic object of considerable generality, the other requiring the specification of various degrees of semantic specialization” (Fillmore 1986 :96). There are obvious weaknesses in this analysis, since it does not explain how a language user determines whether an absent object should be understood as being of “considerable generality”, or, on the contrary, representing a “semantic specialization”. Under the analysis of IOD as being a mechanism of syntactic detransitivisation available for clauses which in various ways deviate from the semantic transitive prototype, the specialised meanings of objectless ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ can be readily

 Prototypical Transitivity

understood as a function of the semantics of these verbs in combination with the semantics of the IOD construction. The semantic property which gives rise to these specialised meanings is in fact the same property that makes these verbs eligible for indefinite object deletion in the first place: affectedness of the agent. I suggested in 4.3.1 that omitting the object with these verbs amounts to highlighting the effects that the action has on the agentive participant, while backgrounding those on the patient, by omitting the patient argument altogether. The so-called specialised readings arise precisely as a result of this emphasis on the effect on the agent. To understand how objectless eat and drink acquire their conventionally understood meanings of ‘eat a meal’ and ‘drink alcohol’, respectively, we must consider the contexts in which these verbs are generally used without an object. As it turns out, these two verbs seem to be in almost complementary distribution with respect to which grammatical contexts favour their use without an overt object NP (see also Newman and Rice 2006). The English verb eat is mostly used without an object in the past tense or perfect: John ate, I have eaten, or in the progressive, I am eating. The generic/habitual ??John eats, on the other hand, is highly unnatural, if not downright ungrammatical. By contrast, objectless uses of the verb drink are most frequently found precisely in a generic/habitual construction, as in John drinks, or Fillmore’s example I’ve tried to stop drinking. The past-tense John drank seems to be mainly interpretable as a habitual statement in the past tense, while the perfect ??John has drunk is extremely peculiar without an object. The progressive John is drinking is possible, though perhaps a little strange out of context; it does not appear to favour the reading ‘drinking alcohol’ to quite the extent that the generic statement does, although this reading is facilitated by the inclusion of a context evoking the act of drinking alcohol: John is in the pub drinking. In fact, if we attempt to interpret drink as referring simply to the ingestion of any kind of drinkable fluid, then the same thing happens with this verb as with eat: it becomes very unnatural in a generic/habitual clause without an object – ??John drinks. Most analyses seem to assume that this is because the conventional use of drink to mean ‘drink alcohol’ somehow blocks the reading ‘drink things in general’, or that the verb drink somehow selects ‘alcohol’ as a kind of privileged argument (Rice 1988). However, this does not explain how this “privileged” reading arose in the first place. Rather than explain the absence of a generic use of drink to mean ‘drink anything’ by invoking an “overriding” reading of such clauses as ‘drink alcohol’, I suggest that the latter should in fact be explained in terms of the former. It is not the case that the reading ‘drink anything’ is unavailable for objectless clauses because the reading ‘drink alcohol’ overrides it; such a statement has little or no explanatory value, saying in effect that objectless drink means ‘drink alcohol’ be-



Chapter 6.  Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion 

cause it means ‘drink alcohol’. Rather, the reading ‘drink alcohol’ is available for generic statements precisely because the ‘drink anything’ reading is pragmatically unnatural and therefore unlikely to be expressed. The naturalness of generic statements is constrained by properties of the world. When verbs like eat and drink do not easily occur in generic objectless statements of the type John smokes, it is for a very simple reason. Eating and drinking are the two most fundamental actions of human existence; their habitual performance is the most basic prerequisite for sustaining life. ??John eats, in the sense that eating is a habit of John’s, is highly peculiar for the obvious reason that humans and animates who do not have this habit simply do not exist – they would be dead (cf. also Fillmore 1977 :135). Referring to inanimate beings, on the other hand, such sentences are much less peculiar; one can imagine, for example, an advertisement listing the attractions of a lifelike doll: She eats, she cries, she sleeps! While the sentence John drinks, taken to mean ‘John habitually imbibes liquids’ is unnatural because is is close to tautological – if John did not have this habit, he would not exist – there is nothing in the English grammar which precludes the construction of such a sentence. Drink is an affected-agent verb highly suited to appear in low-transitivity contexts such as objectless generic constructions; it is the real-world interpretation of this construction which makes it odd. The sentence is syntactically well-formed but semantically strange – which leaves open the possibility of assigning it an alternative interpretation. There are a couple of reasons why a suitable candidate for such an interpretation should be ‘drink alcohol’. The consumption of alcoholic beverages has an important social and cultural function in the Western cultural sphere, and increasingly in the rest of the world. Newman and Rice (2006) take the ‘alcohol’ reading of intransitively-used ‘drink’ to reflect “the prominence of alcohol consumption as a topic of discourse”. In addition to these pragmatic considerations, however, the semantic properties of objectless ‘drink’ – the emphasis on the affectedness of the agent – are in themselves conducive to this particular reading. The reading ‘drink alcohol’ very much preserves, if not augments, the affected-agent semantics of ‘drink’ and of the objectless construction. The act of drinking alcohol involves a highly specific intended effect on the agent – intoxication – which is not only clearly noticeable to the agent himself but also frequently observable to others. It is this intention of achieving a particular effect, and subsequently the habit of being in a particular state, namely intoxication, that we attribute to people when we use drink without an overt object: a statement like John drinks clearly implies that he drinks for the purpose of getting drunk, and that he does so frequently – not that he occasionally sips a glass of wine with his dinner because he enjoys the taste.

 Prototypical Transitivity

Given that the default reading ‘drink liquids’ is unavailable, or rather unnecessary, for pragmatic reasons, then, the ‘drink alcohol’ reading is ideally suited to take over as standard interpretation for generic drink: affectedness of the agent is crucially relevant to its semantics, and it has a sociocultural significance which makes it highly eligible for being cast in some simplified, conventionalised expression. In short, to say of someone that ‘he drinks things’ does not convey any interesting information about the person in question, while saying that ‘he drinks alcohol (frequently/habitually/too much)’ does; so the construction which would normally be used to express the former is more usefully employed as a conventionalised expression of the latter. Objectless eat, on the other hand, shows a different distribution. There does not appear to be any such socially significant variety of the act of eating which could usefully take over the unnecessary generic construction He eats in English; which means that eat is not normally found in this kind of construction – certainly not with reference to humans or animates. On the other hand, objectless eat is found with reference to specific acts of eating that are either ongoing or concluded; and in this use it appears to have the sense of ‘eat a meal’. Recall again that the semantic effect of using an affected-agent verbs in an objectless construction is to emphasise the affectedness of the agent, to the extent that the patient, being immaterial to the meaning conveyed, is suppressed. An objectless ‘eat’ sentence, then, is a statement about the effect on himself that the agent achieves through the act of eating. Typically, the effect one seeks to achieve by eating is that of eliminating hunger; a typical act of eating consists of eating until one is full. Since the amount of food required to achieve this is what we usually refer to as ‘a meal’, this explains the interpretation of objectless ‘eat’ as ‘eat a meal’: if nothing else is specified, we interpret ‘eat’ as meaning ‘eat until full’ – i.e. eat a meal. Indefinite object deletion, then, functions much like antipassivisation in that it is essentially a syntactic mechanism used in contexts of low semantic transitivity. The omission of the object in many cases serves to highlight the particular properties of the agentive participant, for instance its affectedness by the event in question. The analysis in terms of semantic transitivity not only explains why IOD is considerably more common with some verb types than with others (affected-agent verbs, where the agent can be construed as the “endpoint” of the event, and effected-object verbs, whose objects are inherently nonreferential and therefore easily omissible), but also why it may be licensed for just about any verb in the right 2. There are other languages, however, in which objectless ‘eat’ is used for a specific, socially or culturally significant variety of eating. In the Mayan language Quiché, for instance, tix ‘eat’ in the “absolutive voice” (a kind of antipassive construction), that is, with no overt object, takes on a specialised meaning; tix-on ‘eat-ANTIP’ means ‘eat people, be carnivorous’ (Mondloch 1981:198). ‘Drink’, on the other hand, is ungrammatical with the antipassive in Quiché.



Chapter 6.  Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion 

context: as we saw in the previous chapter, semantic transitivity is a property which may be assigned both at the level of the clause and of the individual verb.

6.4 IOD and S/O ambitransitives As noted in the introduction to this chapter, the verbs typically participating in indefinite object deletion has often been treated as part of a larger category, known variously as “labile verbs” or “ambitransitives”. In addition to IOD verbs, also known as S/A ambitransitives, this category is taken to include so-called S/O ambitransitives, or inchoative-causative verb pairs. These are verbs which have both transitive and intransitive uses, but where the single (S) argument of the intransitively used verb corresponds to the O of the transitive, rather than to the A as is the case with verbs which undergo IOD. An English example of an inchoative-causative verb pair is break, which can be used either intransitively with a patient subject (the stick broke) or transitively with the patient as object and an agentive subject (John broke the stick). The analysis of IOD as primarily a syntactic phenomenon, though one which, for semantic reasons, is more likely to apply to some types of verbs than others, suggests that “ambitransitivity” is not in fact the unitary phenomenon it is often assumed to be. As demonstrated above, an adequate analysis of IOD must take into account properties at the level of the clause as well as strictly lexical semantic characteristics. By contrast, the S/O ambitransitives are probably only characterisable as genuine verb pairs, that is, as two distinct lexical items with related meanings. Crucially, in such verb pairs the transitive variant includes a semantic component which is absent from the intransitive, namely the causation of the event by an external agent. The intransitive variant, on the other hand, while not necessarily incompatible with the interpretation that the event is externally caused, does not require such a reading, but rather must denote an event which can be construed as occurring spontaneously (Haspelmath 1993b). In this, such verb pairs differ from the intransitive vs. the transitive use of a verb like ‘eat’, where it is clearly in both cases a condition that a patient is involved in the event, although it is not represented by an overt argument when the verb is used intransitively. Indeed, attempts at treating IOD and inchoative-causative verb pairs as aspects of a single phenomenon of “ambitransitivity” meet with considerable difficulties; and most of the issues raised by such analyses are in fact better accounted for precisely by treating IOD and inchoative-causative verb pairs as distinct phenomena, and understanding IOD to be an expression of low semantic transitivity. An elaborate attempt at a unified analysis of “ambitransitivity” is found in Drossard (1998), where the behaviour of “labile verbs” (ambitransitives) in lan-

 Prototypical Transitivity

guages of different morphosyntactic types is discussed. Drossard quotes ‘boil’, ‘burn’ and ‘break’ as instances of “causatively” alternating verbs (S/O ambitransitives), while ‘eat’ is his main example of what he refers to as “verbs with a facultative patient”, that is, IOD verbs. He then examines the way in which these verb types are encoded formally in languages with ergative and accusative morphosyntax, respectively. On Drossard’s analysis, the causative verb pairs in ergative languages maintain a “patient orientation” across their transitive and intransitive uses: the patient remains represented by an absolutive noun phrase in both cases, whereas an ergative phrase may facultatively be added, yielding a transitive clause (cf. also the data from Samoan in 4.3.2): (6.9) Lezgian (Nakh-Daghestanian, Daghestanian; Haspelmath 1993a cited in Drossard 1998 :75) a. Get’e-Ø xa-na b. Ajal.-di get’e-Ø xa-na pot-abs break-aor child-erg pot-abs break-aor ‘The pot broke.’ ‘The child broke the pot.’

In accusative languages, on the other hand, such verbs change from “patient orientation” in their intransitive use to “agent orientation” in their transitive use; this is reflected in the case marking (for those languages that have case), where the patient changes case from nominative to accusative, while the unmarked nominative case is taken over by the agent: (6.10) German (Indo-European, Germanic; Drossard 1998 :75): a. Der Stock zerbrach b. Der Junge zerbrach den Stock nom stick break.past nom boy break.past acc stick ‘The stick broke.’ ‘The boy broke the stick.’

In accusative languages, then, according to Drossard, it is not only the valency of these verbs that is labile, it is also their orientation: they change from patient orientation in the intransitive use to agent orientation in the transitive. In ergative languages, however, these verbs do not change their orientation when shifting from intransitive to transitive use. Another verb supposedly belonging to the same group is ‘cook’ (German kochen), which in certain accusative languages shows an interesting alternation: the intransitive version may in fact have either an agentive or a patientive reading. 3. I am translating the German kochen with English cook rather than the alternative boil, since in English only cook shows the alternation pattern claimed by Drossard to characterise kochen and illustrated in (6.11). The difference between English cook and boil with respect to possible interpretations of the intransitive version will be discussed below.



Chapter 6.  Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion 

(6.11) a. German: Der Missionar kochte. b. English: The missionary cooked/was cooking.

The sentences in (6.11) have as perhaps their most plausible reading that the missionary was engaged in some cooking, was cooking something; but it is perfectly possible to get the somewhat more macabre reading where a cannibalistic tribe has put the missionary in a pot over the fire and he is now cooking so as to be the main course in their evening meal. In other words, claims Drossard, verbs of the “break/boil type” are “potentially orientation labile” (potentiell orientierungslabil) in their intransitive use in accusative languages: their S argument may be interpreted either as an agent or a patient. By contrast, the “verbs with facultative patient” do not have labile orientation in accusative languages; they retain the same semantic argument, the agent, in the nominative case whether the verb is transitive or intransitive: (6.12) German (Drossard 1998 :76): a. Das Mädchen aß b. nom girl eat.past ‘The girl ate.’

Das Mädchen aß einen Apfel nom girl eat.past acc apple ‘The girl ate an apple.’

These verbs, however, do have a labile orientation in at least some ergative languages; Drossard quotes Tongan, where the single argument of kai ‘eat’ can be interpreted either as the agent or the patient, similarly to the corresponding Samoan examples presented in 4.3.2: (6.13)

Tongan (Austronesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian; Drossard 1998 :76) Na’e kai ‘ae ika’ ta eat abs fish ‘The fish ate’ or ‘The fish was eaten.’

Drossard’s claim is, then, that verbs of the boil/break type have a labile orientation in accusative languages, but not in ergative languages where only their valency is labile; while verbs of the eat type conversely have a labile orientation in (some) ergative languages, but only labile valency in accusative languages. He relates this to the fairly well-known analysis of ergative languages as being “patient-oriented” while accusative languages are “agent-oriented”. Break verbs, then, being themselves “prototypically patient-oriented” or “unaccusative”, should be more “easily compatible” with patient-oriented languages, i.e. ergative languages, so that these verbs show no lability of orientation in these languages; while conversely, eat verbs are “prototypically agent-oriented” and so are not orientation labile in “agent-oriented” accusative languages. It is when the “orientation” of the language type and the verb type clashes that we get labile orientations, i.e. the possibility of interpret-

 Prototypical Transitivity

ing the single argument of the intransitive version of a labile verb as either agent or patient. This is illustrated in the following schema: (6.14) Interaction of verb orientation and language orientation, Drossard 1998):

AG-or. Verben PAT-or. Verben

AG-Orientierung (NOM-Sprachen)

PAT-Orientierung (ERG-Sprachen)

– orientierungslabil + orientierungslabil

+ orientierungslabil – orientierungslabil

On more detailed examination, however, this appealingly simple and tidy system shows some serious defects. Firstly, note that Drossard’s examples illustrating the behaviour of “break/boil-type” verbs are very carefully chosen to achieve the results he is after. It is true that these verbs show a “stability” of argument encoding in ergative languages that they lack in accusative languages, retaining absolutive encoding of the patient rather than shifting from nominative to accusative. This is down to the basic facts of the semantics of these verbs combined with the properties of the respective case-marking systems: ergative languages by definition encode S and O arguments the same while accusative languages mark O differently from the set of S and A. It is also not unreasonable to refer to these verbs as “patient-oriented”, since they retain the patient rather than the agent in the intransitive alternant. It is not the case, however, that verbs of this type uniformly show the kind of “orientation lability” illustrated by Drossard for kochen/cook, that is, the possibility of interpreting the S of the intransitive alternant either as agent or patient in accusative languages. While cook does, neither break nor boil do in English, and neither does German zerbrechen in example (6.10); (6.10a) would not, with an animate and therefore potentially agentive subject, show an alternative “agent-oriented” reading (‘X broke something’). It is simply not the case, then, that there is a semantically defined group of “patient-oriented verbs” which show this kind of lability in accusative languages. Conversely, it is not clear precisely which verbs are supposed to belong to the “eat group” which supposedly shows a labile orientation in at least certain ergative languages. Drossard only quotes one other example of a “verb with facultative patient” in his paper, namely in the introduction where two Chukchi clauses with a verb meaning ‘drill’ are presented, with and without object, respectively. While Chukchi is an ergative language, it differs from Tongan or Samoan in that it crossreferences arguments on the verb; and so no ambiguity of the kind seen in (6.13)



Chapter 6.  Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion 

for Tongan is possible. No other examples of verbs having “facultative patients” or belonging to the “eat group” are presented. In short, the “orientation lability” claimed by Drossard to be a property of classes of verbs within specific morphosyntactic coding systems is in reality restricted to a small set of individual lexical items. Accordingly, it is in the lexical semantic properties of these particular items that the explanation for their striking behaviour is to be found. The semantic properties of ‘eat’ have been thoroughly discussed above and in chapter 4. The semantic peculiarity of the verb ‘eat’ is having two affected arguments, both the agent and the patient, and in an ergative language like Tongan or Samoan, a single absolutive argument NP may be interpreted as referring to either of these, the absolutive typically being the case of affected arguments. In chapter 4, we saw that in Samoan the class of verbs exhibiting this type of “lability” is characterised precisely by the presence of an affected A argument. Given the definition of prototypical transitivity in terms of the semantic distinction of arguments, the affected-agent analysis explains not only why ‘eat’ has “labile orientation” in these languages, but also why it appears to have a labile valency: its affected-agent semantics makes it highly eligible for indefinite object deletion. Unless it can be shown that other verbs without affected-agent semantics show similar behaviour in the languages in question, there does not seem to be any reason to assume the existence of a class of “agent-oriented labile verbs” which behave in a certain way in ergative languages; note that Drossard himself does not clarify which verbs besides ‘eat’ are to be included in this category. What remains to be explained are the “patient-oriented” alternating verbs illustrated in (6.11). We noted that the verbs ‘break’ and ‘boil’, claimed by Drossard to belong to the same formal class as cook/kochen, do not show the alternation in (6.11), and that therefore the particular behaviour of cook/kochen must be a function of the semantic properties of these specific verbs rather than of some broader class of “orientation labile” verbs. There is a difference between the two readings of a sentence like The missionary was cooking beyond just the question of whether the NP the missionary is interpreted as the agent or the patient of cook. In the latter case, the missionary is undergoing a change of state from noncooked to cooked; in other words he is an affected argument, a genuine patient. This is consistent with the intransitive verb cook being a member of an inchoative-causative verb pair; as demonstrated by Haspelmath (1993b), it is a prerequisite for a verb to be able to participate in such a pair that it refer to a change of state. 4. It may also refer to what Haspelmath calls a “going-on”, a “non-agentive activity in the Vendlerian sense” (Haspelmath 1993b:108).

 Prototypical Transitivity

By contrast, when the missionary is taken as the agent the sentence has a somewhat different reading, namely that the missionary is in the process of preparing a meal. The omitted argument here is not a patient in the sense of an entity going through a transformation from raw to cooked; rather, it is an entity being produced through the act of cooking: an effected object. In other words, what characterises the verb cook semantically is the same property that was demonstrated for bake in 6.3.1 above: the transitive cook is ambiguous between an affected-object and an effected-object reading. We saw above that for such verbs, indefinite object deletion is only permissible with the effectedobject reading. That is, an intransitive clause where the S is interpreted as an agent can only be read as referring to the agent’s bringing something into existence. Dad is baking can only mean that he is producing things from loose ingredients through a process of mixing and heating them (baking bread or cookies); it cannot mean that he is putting already existent objects through a process which produces an alteration in them (baking potatoes). On the other hand, the patient-subject variety, for instance the potatoes are baking, clearly has the affected-object reading, as predicted by the restriction of inchoative-causative verb pairs to verbs referring to a change of state. This is obvious when the S is potatoes, which cannot under any circumstances be interpreted as being brought into existence through the process of baking; but even a sentence such as the cookies are baking can only be read as meaning that the cookies are in the oven being transformed from dough to finished cookies. There is no way that the cookies are baking can mean that the cookie dough is in the process of being made and shaped; it can only refer to the process of changing the state of the finished cookies from doughy and sticky to crisp and crunchy. By contrast, Dad is baking is perfectly felicitous in a situation where Dad has started mixing together the ingredients for cookie dough, but has not yet actually put anything in the oven. Exactly the same patterning is found with cook: it is ambiguous between an affected-object and an effected-object reading. The effected-object transitive corresponds to the agentive intransitive and has the meaning ‘produce through cooking’; Dad is cooking (dinner/lunch/a snack). The affected-object transitive, on the other hand, corresponds to the patientive intransitive; the potatoes are cooking. In short, the “labile orientation” of the intransitive verb cook and its equivalents in other accusative languages stems not from the fact that its “patient-orientation” clashes with the “agent-orientation” of the language in question, but from the ambiguity of the transitive verb which yields two alternative intransitive versions corresponding to the two different readings of the transitive: The effected-object transitive permits indefinite object deletion which yields an agentive intransitive, while the affected-object transitive participates in an inchoative-causative verb pair whose other member is a patientive intransitive. That this is so can be seen from the



Chapter 6.  Ambitransitivity and indefinite object deletion 

fact that other so-called “patient-oriented” verbs such as boil or break do not behave in this way: these verbs have only an affected-object reading and so do not undergo IOD; their only possible intransitive alternant is a patientive one. To conclude, “S/A ambitransitivity” does not exist as a purely lexical phenomenon, although some semantic classes of verbs are more susceptible to it than others; this is because their semantics is particularly compatible with that of the indefinite object deletion construction. The basic function of this construction is to allow for the encoding of events which lack two clearly conceptually distinct participants in a clause with only one formal argument, as discussed in chapter 2. An O participant is typically omissible when it is not clearly distinct from the agentive participant, though the reasons for this may vary: the agent may itself be affected, leading to the effect on the O being perceived as secondary from the agent’s point of view; or the O may be nonreferential, low in individuation, or seen as unaffected or less affected. While these properties are inherent to the semantics of certain classes of verbs, they may equally well arise at the level of the clause, which means that indefinite object deletion must be understood as a syntactic phenomenon, a process of detransitivisation.

chapter 7

Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking

7.1 Introduction Case-marking is one of the main ways in which languages encode verb-argument relations; as such, it is intimately connected with the notion of transitivity. In functional typology, case-marking of core arguments is generally approached from one of two theoretical viewpoints: The discriminatory approach assumes that the basic function of core case-marking is to overtly distinguish between the arguments of a transitive clause: in a two-argument clause, it may be necessary or desirable to overtly indicate which argument noun phrase refers to the subject/agent and which to the object/patient, and this is achieved though the use of overt case-marking on one of the arguments, either ergative case on the subject or accusative case on the object. The indexing approach, on the other hand, claims that case-marking reflects or indexes certain semantic properties of the argument to which it applies, such as affectedness on the part of the object or control on the part of the subject. The precise semantic properties which may be reflected by case-marking in a transitive clause obviously depend on exactly which properties are assumed to be typically present in a transitive clause. In this chapter, I will examine how the concept of maximal semantic distinction as a defining property of transitivity can be exploited in the analysis of core case-marking. I will argue that certain case-marking data can in fact only be plausibly explained with reference to transitivity as defined through the maximal semantic distinction of arguments. The analysis suggested by these data indicates the necessity of a unified account integrating both the discriminatory and the indexing aspects of case-marking into a single model: the canonical function of core case-marking is to distinguish between the participants of a fully transitive clause, that is, a clause where there is maximal semantic distinction of arguments.

 Prototypical Transitivity

7.2 The discriminatory analysis The common understanding of core case-marking in functional typology is that it serves as a device for distinguishing between the arguments of a bivalent clause. Overt marking on one of the two arguments of a transitive clause is taken to function as a means of clarifying which participant is filling which syntactic function in the clause, a view which is supported by the fact that some languages restrict overt case-marking to instances where such clarification may be required. Thus Finnish only employs the accusative case on objects in clauses which also contain an overt subject, while in subjectless constructions such as imperatives, the object is unmarked (Comrie 1975); the Papuan language Waskia has an agent/subject marker ke which is only used when there might otherwise be some doubt as to which argument of a bivalent clause is the subject, such as when the subject is inanimate, or when it is displaced from its usual sentence-initial position (Ross and Paol 1978); in the Australian language Yuwaalaraay, which has an ergative casemarking pattern on nouns but an accusative pattern on pronouns, the ergative case is optional “where the context serves to disambiguate the sentence”, for example when the object is pronominal and therefore marked with the accusative case (Williams 1980; for similar examples see Dixon 1994 :58–9). A phenomenon frequently cited in support of the discriminatory analysis is so-called differential object marking or DOM (Bossong 1985, 1991; Aissen 2003), which was mentioned briefly in chapter 2. While some languages overtly case-mark all syntactic direct objects, and others do not case-mark any objects, there is a wide range of languages where object case-marking differs according to certain properties of the object NP. Such differential marking of objects appears crosslinguistically to be triggered by a limited set of factors including, and perhaps limited to, the definiteness, specificity, and animacy of the object NP or NP referent. Thus English, for example, has a separate accusative case only for animate-referring pronouns (the inanimate third person pronoun it does not have a distinct accusative form); Hebrew (7.1) uses an overt case-marker on definite objects, but not on indefinite ones; while Catalan (7.2) case-marks human objects (in the standard written language, only pronoun objects) but not objects referring to non-human entities: (7.1) Hebrew (Afro-Asiatic, Semitic; Hopper and Thompson 1980 :256): a. David natan matana lәrina D. gave present to.Rina ‘David gave a present to Rina.’ b. David natan et ha-matana lәrina D. gave obj def-present to.Rina ‘David gave the present to Rina.’



Chapter 7.  Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 

(7.2) Catalan (Indo-European, Romance; Hualde 1992 :87, 241): a. El pagès va obrir les finestres the peasant paux.3s open.inf the windows ‘The peasant opened the windows.’ b. Veuré a la Maria see.fut.1s obj art M. ‘I will see Maria.’

We noted in chapter 2 that these case-marking patterns are taken to reflect the markedness of highly individuated objects. The assumption is that the need for overt marking of an argument may be greater in some instances than in others. If it is possible to unambiguously identify the subject and object of the clause on the basis of real-world properties alone, case-marking is essentially superfluous. It is part of our knowledge about language that subjects are typically instigating participants, and our knowledge of the world tells us that such participants will generally be definite and animate. If a clause has only one core NP with these properties, while the other core NP is indefinite and/or inanimate, associating these NPs with the correct syntactic function is an uncomplicated matter: in a sentence such as Peter kicked the ball, anyone with a basic understanding of how the world works can figure out who did the kicking and who – or rather, what – got kicked. The problem arises when both NPs have similar real-world properties. In the sentence Peter kicked John, word-order clues aside, the association between arguments and syntactic functions is much less obvious; in principle, either participant could be the aggressor or the victim, and therefore either participant could potentially be either subject or object. Only in such cases, then, does the need arise for additional clues for the identification of syntactic functions. In other words, only when the object is highly individuated, being definite and/or animate – that is, when the object resembles a potential subject – is case-marking necessary. Thus “subject-like” properties of objects is what triggers DOM – definiteness in the case of Hebrew, animacy in the case of Catalan, a combination of the two in a number of other languages. Markedness theory assumes an iconic relation between form and meaning: a morphologically marked form is taken to imply a somehow marked meaning. In the case of DOM, the formal opposition is between the presence of an overt case-marker versus the absence of any such marker. Since the overt marker occurs on definite and/or animate objects, this is taken to indicate that such objects are marked with respect to indefinite/inanimate ones, in other words, that definiteness and animacy are marked properties for objects (Aissen 2003 :438). An unmarked object, on this account, is taken to be one which is easily distinguishable from the clause subject in

 Prototypical Transitivity

terms of degree of individuation, and so “subject-like” objects receive an overt morphological marker as an indication of their semantic markedness. A difficulty with this analysis was pointed out in chapter 2. In many languages only definite NPs are candidates for syntactic objecthood at all; indefinite O arguments are encoded in various intransitive constructions. Referring to definite Os as “marked objects” when they are the only kind of syntactic object a language has is obviously problematic. There is little documentation of a similar restriction with respect to animacy; that is, few or no languages seem to restrict syntactic objecthood to animate-referring NPs. This is perhaps not surprising, since the property of animacy has a different ontological status than that of definiteness: it is a property of entities referred to by noun phrases, rather than of the noun phrases themselves, and it seems reasonable that a language should not place restrictions on the kinds of entities which can be construed as objects of transitive events. Still, within a limited grammatical domain, such a restriction does appear to occur in the Salishan language Halkomelem. Both animate and inanimate NPs can be objects of underived transitive clauses in Halkomelem; but only animate NPs can undergo the process described as “advancement to object”, whereby an NP which is semantically a recipient, benefactive, cause of experience, or a goal of motion, is expressed as a syntactic object (Gerdts 1988 :23–24). Thus, for example, stimulus arguments of experience verbs tend to be expressed as obliques if inanimate (7.3a-b), but as direct objects if animate (7.3b-c): (7.3) Halkomelem (Salishan, Central Salish; Gerdts 1988 :24): a. ni cәn si si ә kw ә tintin aux 1sbj frighten obl det bell ‘I was frightened of the bell.’ b. ?*ni cәn si si -me -t kw ә tintin aux 1sbj frighten-adv-tr det bell ‘I was frightened of the bell.’ c. ??ni cәn si si ә kw ә aux 1sbj frighten obl det ‘I was frightened of the screech owl.’

spәpәlqwi ’e screech.owl

d. ni cәn si si -me -t kw ә spәpәlqwi ’e aux 1sbj frighten-adv-tr det screech.owl ‘I was frightened of the screech owl.’

There are also languages where, in ditransitive clauses, the animate benefactive/recipient rather than the inanimate Patient will tend to be the syntactic direct object



Chapter 7.  Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 

(see e.g. Givón 1984b). In Meithei or Manipuri, the ‘patient’ suffix –bu marks “that animate being seen as most affected by an activity” (Dixon 1994 :30). Thus in a ditransitive event, the object transferred will take the –bu marker if it is animate; if it is inanimate, the marker is instead used on the (animate) recipient. In (7.4a), then, the animate “gift” is marked in the same way as the Patient/object of a monotransitive clause, while the recipient takes dative marking; in (7.4b), the gift is inanimate, and so it is the recipient which takes patientive marking: (7.4) Meithei (Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman; Bhat and Ningomba 1997 :113) a. әy-nә maŋon-dә sәn-du-bu pi I-erg he-loc cow-that-acc give ‘I gave that cow to him.’ b әy-nә ma-bu sel pi I-erg he-acc money give ‘I gave him money.’

In general, if there is a choice between two candidates for syntactic object position, where one is animate and the other inanimate, the animate participant will tend to be chosen (Fillmore 1977, Hopper and Thompson 1980); Fillmore presents the example pair I beat Harry with the stick vs ?I beat the stick against Harry (Fillmore 1977 :97). As noted in chapter 2, these data suggest that a high degree of individuation is in fact a prerequisite for objecthood in some languages, or at least a property which strongly favours syntactic objecthood. This is not in itself a problem for a discriminatory analysis of case-marking, but it is a problem for the interpretation often taken to follow from the discriminatory approach, namely that differential marking of objects reflects the markedness of definite/animate objects as opposed to indefinite/inanimate objects. An alternative interpretation of these markedness patterns was discussed in 2.3.4. The markedness analysis of DOM implies certain predictions for subject marking. Aissen (2003) analyses DOM in terms of a concept known as markedness reversal: “exactly what is marked for objects is unmarked for subjects” (Aissen 2003 :438). That is, while definiteness and animacy is associated with overt case-marking as far as objects are concerned, exactly the opposite is predicted to hold for transitive subjects: definiteness and animacy are unmarked properties for subjects. Indeed, the markedness of definite/animate objects is taken to follow 1. Bhat and Ningomba gloss the suffix -nә ‘nominative’. It is used to mark a controlling agent, regardless of the transitivity of the verb, as well as to mark an instrument, cause or means by which an action is performed. As marking a controlling agent (although prototypically in a transitive clause) will be argued in 7.5 below to be the core function of the ergative case, I have chosen the gloss ‘ergative’ rather than nominative.

 Prototypical Transitivity

from this, since it is exactly the presence of “unmarked subject properties” on objects which is assumed to lead to the necessity of overtly case-marking such objects, for purposes of disambiguation. It is predicted, then, that one will find the opposite case-marking patterns for transitive subjects and objects: while objects typically take case-marking when they are definite and/or animate, subjects should be more typically case-marked when they are indefinite and/or inanimate. (For a discussion of some problems with applying the notion of markedness reversal to this particular opposition, see Næss 2004). As it turns out, overt marking of indefinite as opposed to definite subjects appears not to be reliably attested (Comrie 1989 :130). Marking of only inanimate subjects, or only common noun subjects as opposed to pronouns, or only 3rd but not 1st or 2nd person pronouns, is fairly widespread, and all of these distinctions may be considered instantiations of an animacy hierarchy. An interesting fact about such animacy-driven differential subject marking, however, is that it nearly always seems to occur in split-marking systems, that is, systems which also show differential marking of objects. This is certainly the case for most of the languages cited by Aissen (2003 :473) as having such marking, namely Guugu Yimidhirr, Punjabi, and Dyirbal; the Papuan language Fore (Trans-New Guinea) may be an exception. This suggests that the parallel between differential marking of subjects and objects on the parameters of definiteness and animacy is not as clear-cut as the discriminatory analysis would have it: differential object marking, as should be clear from the examples presented earlier, is widespread in languages which do not also show differential subject marking, but the opposite is rarely the case. An explanation for this will be suggested in 7.8 below. An interesting fact concerning restrictions on inanimate subjects in the Mayan language Jakaltek is overlooked by Aissen, who claims that this language “exclude[s] inanimate subjects (in transitive clauses) altogether” (Aissen 2003 :443). This is not entirely accurate; Jakaltek does permit inanimate Forces as transitive subjects, but only with a limited set of verbs. Craig (1977 :74) describes these as “transitive verbs of complete destruction” – that is, verbs with highly affected objects. Thus the verb ‘to close’ is ungrammatical with an inanimate subject (7.5b), while verbs like ‘destroy’ or ‘smash’ unproblematically take Forces as subjects (c-d): (7.5) Jakaltek (Mayan; Craig 1977 :73): a. Speba naj te’ pulta close cl.he cl.the door ‘He closed the door.’ 2. Punjabi object-marking is in principle independent of the subject-marking, working on the parameter of animacy/definiteness rather than the 1st/2nd vs. 3rd-person distinction relevant for subject marking, and so may not be directly relevant to this point. See 7.8.



Chapter 7.  Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 

b. *Speba cake te’ pulta close wind cl.the door ‘The wind closed the door.’ c. xetatoj ha’ ab ixim awal destroyed cl.the rain cl.the cornfield ‘The rain destroyed the cornfield.’ d. xic’oj cake te’ ah smashed wind cl.the house ‘The wind smashed the house.’

A restriction on the animacy of the subject alone cannot explain the Jakaltek data. It seems that the degree to which the object is affected – its “complete destruction” – is also relevant; we will return to this in 7.6 below. Furthermore, there are languages where only subjects take case-marking (and where no corresponding differential marking of objects is necessarily found), but where the patterning is quite different from that predicted by Aissen and others. In one variety of the Iranian language Wakhi, for instance, only 1st and 2nd person subjects, the highest on the animacy hierarchy, can take overt case-marking (Bashir 1986). In Mayan, only the pronominal system shows ergative marking (Givón 2001a). In the Tibeto-Burman language Meithei, the Papuan Podopa, and a number of other languages, overt case-marking of subjects does not depend on the animacy or definiteness hierarchies, but rather occurs only on subjects that are perceived to be in control of the verbal action (Dixon 1994 :29ff). It is clear, then, that there are aspects of core case-marking which are not adequately explained by a discriminatory analysis alone; nor do all the predictions following from such an analysis appear to be entirely correct. The main alternative analysis emphasises the semantic content of core case-markers: specific casemarkers are typically applied to arguments which show a certain semantic relation to their predicate.

7.3 The indexing analysis The so-called indexing approach to core case-marking argues that the case-markers are not simply formal disambiguating devices, but have semantic content relating to the properties ascribed to the case-marked participants. Wierzbicka (1981) points out that the Russian system of differential object marking cannot be accounted for purely in terms of the overt marking of “subject-like” objects. In Russian, the accusative case is formally identical with the nominative for some classes of nouns, and with the genitive for others; certain nouns also have a formally dis-

 Prototypical Transitivity

tinct accusative case. Some Russian verbs show differential object marking based on definiteness, where a definite object takes the accusative case while indefinite objects take the genitive. Crucially, this holds even where the accusative is formally identical to the nominative – that is, where no overt formal marker distinguishes the “marked” definite object from the subject: (7.6) Russian (Indo-European, Slavic; Wierzbicka 1981 :56): a. Ivan ždet tramvaj-a Ivan is.waiting.for tram-gen ‘Ivan is waiting for a tram.’ b. Ivan ždet tramvaj Ivan is.waiting.for tram.acc ‘Ivan is waiting for the tram.’

If differential object marking is understood purely in terms of the overt marking of some objects versus no such overt marking of others, the marking pattern in (7.6) is exactly the opposite of what would be predicted by the discriminatory analysis: the indefinite object is overtly marked, whereas the definite and therefore “more subject-like” object receives no overt marking that distinguishes it from the subject. Rather, argues Wierzbicka, the accusative case as a grammatical category, regardless of its formal expression in a given instance, must be analysed as reflecting a basic meaning. This meaning she paraphrases as “something happened to Y because X did something” (Wierzbicka 1981 :55) – in other words, the accusativemarked object is construed as affected by some action. Similarly, ergative case has often been analysed as a marker of a controlling agent. Note that such an “indexing” analysis does not in itself exclude the possibility that case may also have a discriminatory function. Many researchers allow that both functions must probably be taken into consideration in order to account for the range of crosslinguistic variation in case-marking systems. However, indexing and discrimination are usually conceptualised as distinct, independent functions of case-marking, and it is not clear how they relate to each other. Moreover, there are certain case-marking data which cannot adequately be accounted for within either a strictly indexing or a strictly discriminatory approach. What is required, rather, is a unified account which takes both of these aspects into consideration – and the link between them is semantic transitivity, defined in terms of the maximal distinction of arguments.



Chapter 7.  Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 

7.4 Case and the maximal semantic distinction of arguments 7.4.1 Patient/object marking Some languages have case-markers which cannot unproblematically be analysed as functioning to discriminate between the syntactic arguments of the clause; at the same time, they do not directly reflect any semantic properties of the argument to which they attach. Rather, they appear to relate to semantic properties of the clause as a whole: whether the event is construed as involving both a controlling Agent and an affected Patient. The Indo-Aryan language Marwari (called Shekhawati in Haspelmath et al. 2005) has a case-marker –ne with a number of different uses. It marks various kinds of “dative” functions such as goal, destination or recipient, as well as “saliently affected” direct objects, and the causee arguments of some causative constructions (Magier 1985). It is also used on the subject argument of some passive clauses – that is, on the semantic patient. However, the use of –ne on passive subjects is restricted to cases where the passive agent is construed as volitional; this holds whether or not this agent is actually overtly expressed in the clause. Thus (7.7a) just means that Ram was killed, and nothing further is implied about whether he was the victim of an accident or a deliberate attack. (7.7b), on the other hand, can only mean that Ram was deliberately murdered: (7.7) Marwari (Indo-European, Indic; Magier 1985 :155): a. Rām mārīj-iyo b. Rām-ne mārīj-iyo Ram kill-pass Ram-ne kill-pass ‘Ram was killed (intentionally or otherwise).’ ‘Ram was murdered.’

There are several things to be noted with respect to these examples. The first is that the case-marking on the patient subject here does not depend on any properties of the case-marked argument, in other words it is not indexing in the usual sense of the term. But nor does it appear to be discriminatory, since the clause has no other overt argument which the subject might need to be distinguished from. Secondly, the case-marker does reflect the semantic properties of a participant in the event, but not of the participant to which it attaches; it indicates volitionality on the part of the agent, while appearing on the patient NP. Finally, note that this agent to which volitionality is being ascribed is not in fact overtly expressed in the clause. A somewhat similar case-marking pattern can be found in Chepang. As noted in 4.3.5, this language has an object or “goal” case-marker which applies only to an object which is “intentionally affected”, that is, when it is presented as the intended goal of the act performed by the agent. In (7.8a), where the object is unmarked, the death of the younger brother was not the intended outcome of the agents’ act,

 Prototypical Transitivity

whereas (7.8b), where the object is marked with -kay, can only be interpreted as meaning that the agent performed the act with the intention of causing the patient’s death: (7.8) Chepang (Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman; Caughley 1982: 68). a. Pu -nis- i hәw sat- aka-c-u OBro-du-ag YoBro kill-past-du-ag ‘The two older brothers killed the younger brother (accidentally).’ b. Hәw-kay pu -nis- i sat- a-thәy YoBro-gl OBro- du-ag kill- past-gl ‘The two older brothers killed the younger brother (on purpose).’

For these examples, too, an analysis either in terms of indexing or discrimination is problematic. Again, the case-marker does not appear to reflect any properties of the case-marked argument itself, but rather of the other argument of the clause: O is case-marked only when A is volitional. It might be argued that the case-marker does in fact reflect a property of the object, but that this property is dependent on the volitionality of the agent; this could account for the data in (7.7–8). One would then be required to justify the existence of such a dependent property. The most likely candidate is probably affectedness, which has occasionally been claimed to vary with the degree of intentionality of the agent; for instance, Hopper and Thompson (1980: 252) claim that “the effect on the patient is typically more apparent when the A is presented as acting purposefully”. However, there is no independent evidence of any difference in the effect on the patients/objects in examples like (7.7ab) and (7.8ab). The act of killing has exactly the same effect whether or not it is performed with intent – either way, the victim is just as dead. There is no observable real-world distinction between the effects of the acts described in (7.7–8a) and (7.7–8b), and so there does not seem to be any justification for claiming that the case-marker reflects such a distinction. An analysis in terms of discrimination is equally problematic. A straightforward DOM analysis in terms of “marked properties of objects” will not work, since the properties of the object are the same in both examples; it is the properties ascribed to the subject that differ. Even if we disregard this, and consider the overt case-marker in (7.8b) to be triggered by a greater need to differentiate subject from 3. There is no information in the source indicating to what extent the word-order difference in (7.8a-b) is relevant to the interpretation. Note that the –kay marker indicates not simply volitionality on the part of the agent, but the fact that the agent’s volition is directed towards the object in question, that is, that the effect registered on the object is the one the agent was intending to cause; cf. 3.2.6 and 5.3.2.



Chapter 7.  Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 

object in this example than in (7.8a), it remains to be explained why volitionality on the part of the subject participant should trigger such a need. Indeed, if the need for overt differentiation is greater the more semantically similar the subject and object arguments are, then volitionality on the part of the subject should, if anything, be expected to diminish this need, since a volitional subject is clearly less similar to a typical object than a nonvolitional one. German shows a similar type of contrast in certain constructions, although here, the alternation is between accusative and dative case-marking rather than between overt case-marking versus no marking. This concerns constructions where a possessor of a body part is encoded as the object of an action affecting the body part. If the subject is human, the possessor may take either the accusative or the dative case; whereas if the subject is an inanimate Force, the accusative – the typical case of transitive objects – is excluded: (7.9) German (Indo-European, Germanic; Lamiroy and Delbecque 1998 :38) a. Der Mann hat mir/mich ins Gesicht geschlagen nom man has 1sg.dat/acc in.the face hit ‘The man hit me in the face.’ b. Der Regen hat mir/*mich ins Gesicht geschlagen nom rain has 1sg.dat/*acc in.the face hit ‘The rain hit me in the face.’

It should be noted that not all speakers of German find the accusative in (7.9a) acceptable. Comox (Salishan, Canada) also has object marking which reflects the volitionality or intentionality of the agent participant, although the markers in this language are verbal cross-referencing suffixes rather than case-markers on the nouns themselves. Comox has two sets of object cross-referencing suffixes: one used for objects of actions that are conceived of as intentional, another for objects of actions considered to be nonintentional. The second set occurs with verb stems whose meaning is not considered to involve intentionality, such as ‘to startle’; but it may also be used with regular transitive verbs, with the meaning “accidentally” (Harris 1981). Mam, a Mayan language of Guatemala, shows the same contrast, but only in antipassive clauses, where the patient argument is demoted to an oblique. In such constructions, there are two alternative “relational nouns” which may mark the demoted patient: -i7j denotes that the patient was subjected to a purposeful action, while –ee, also found with “dative” functions (see chapter 8), implies that the action was “accidental, uncompleted, or by surprise” (England 1983 :223).

 Prototypical Transitivity

(7.10) Mam (Mayan, England 1983 :223): a. Cheep Ø-b’iyoo-n ky-i7j kab’ xiinaq José 3sg.ag-hit-antip 3s-rn/pat two man ‘José hit the men.’ (I saw it and he was in the fight the whole time and intended to hit them.) b. Cheep Ø-b’iyoo-n ky-e ab’ xiinaq José 3sg.ag-hit-antip 3s-rn/dat two man ‘José hit the men.’ (All of a sudden he came on the scene and in helping those who were in the fight hit someone.)

In short, in a number of languages object marking may depend on certain properties of the subject/agent; specifically, whether or not the agent is acting intentionally. In fact, the opposite phenomenon also occurs: subject case-marking depending on properties of the object. 7.4.2 Agent/subject marking In the Panoan language Shipibo-Conibo, the A argument of a transitive clause takes ergative case only when the object NP is referential; in clauses with nonreferential objects the A is unmarked: (7.11) Shipibo-Conibo (Panoan; Valenzuela 1997 cited in Kittilä 2002a :212) a. Ea-Ø-ra yapa-Ø pi-kas-ai I-abs-as fish-abs eat-des-incompl ‘I want to eat fish (referential or nonreferential).’ b. E-n-ra yapa-Ø pi-kas-ai I-erg-as fish-abs eat-des-incompl ‘I want to eat the fish (referential only).’

This pattern of “differential subject marking” is all the more interesting in light of the fact that differential marking based on the referentiality of the subject itself is unattested, as noted above (see also Næss 2004). The ergative case-marker in Shipibo-Conibo, then, appears to reflect properties of the other argument of the clause, rather than of the case-marked argument itself. The Polynesian language Niuean shows a somewhat similar phenomenon: here the ergative case, which is normally used for the A argument of transitive verbs, can be extended to the basically intransitive verbs nofo ‘sit, stay’ and mohe ‘sleep’, provided 4. Typically, indefinite or nonreferential subjects tend to be avoided altogether in transitive clauses (Comrie 1989:130). This represents an interesting parallel to the encoding of indefinite O participants in formally intransitive constructions discussed in 2.3.2.



Chapter 7.  Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 

that the action in question is “viewed as having a direct effect on the location involved” (Seiter 1980 :63). Thus one gets sentence pairs like the following: (7.12) Niuean (Austronesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian; Seiter 1980 :63): a. Kua mohe a ia he fale prf sleep abs he in house ‘He has slept in the house.’ b. Kua mohe e ia e timeni prf sleep erg he abs floor ‘He has slept on the floor.’ (some effect on the floor implied)

As with the object-marking examples above, neither an indexing nor a discriminatory analysis appears to account for these examples. The two participants have the same inherent properties – human subject, definite and inanimate object – in both sentences, so discrimination on the basis of these properties is unlikely to be the function of the ergative marker in (7.12b). The act performed by the agentive participant is exactly the same in (7.12a) as in (7.12b), so the case-marker does not appear to index any properties of the argument which it marks. Rather, the ergative case depends on the way in which the other participant of the clause is construed; whether it is taken to be directly affected by the action or not. Similarly, in the Australian language Bunuba, the ergative case can occur on the subject of certain intransitive verbs, but only if another participant besides the agent is presupposed to be involved in, or affected by, the event. The use of the ergative case on intransitive subjects “implicate[s] a second object-like participant that ranks relatively highly in terms of... individuation” (Rumsey 2000 :109). That is, the ergative is used for participants whose volitional act is perceived as affecting some other entity (cf. Wierzbicka 1981 :70): (7.13)

Bunuba (Australian, Bunuban; Rumsey 2000 :109) Nyirraji-ingga baga’ranganggi this one-erg sleep.3sg.ra.pres.2sg.obl ‘This one is sleeping with your wife (lit. sleeping, affecting you).’

The circumstances governing the use of the ergative case are similar in all these languages. In Bunuba, the property cited in the source is individuation; the action must involve a second, highly individuated participant. Similarly, in ShipiboConibo, the referentiality of the object is relevant to ergative marking. In Niuean, the second participant must be affected by the act. We have seen earlier that affectedness in many cases depends on individuation and referentiality. Effected objects were argued in chapter 5 not to be affected in the usual sense because they are nonreferential; according to Hopper and Thomp-

 Prototypical Transitivity

son (1980: 253), “[a]n action can be more effectively transferred to a patient which is individuated than one which is not”. Moravcsik (1978) finds a correlation between individuation and affectedness with respect to the use of the accusative case: this case tends to appear on objects which are definite, human or animate, and highly affected. In short, these languages apply ergative marking only when there is a clearly affected object. Similarly, in the examples in 7.4.1 above, object marking (accusative case) was employed only when the agent was acting volitionally. In other words, these languages restrict core case-marking to clauses which are fully semantically transitive, by the definition in 3.2.6.

7.5 Case and semantic transitivity – unifying discrimination and indexing The languages discussed in section 7.4 place restrictions on case-marking in terms of the transitivity of the overall clause: a volitional Agent takes ergative case, but only if the object is a proper Patient; or Patient objects are case-marked only if the subject is a semantic Agent. In other words, when the participants are not in maximal semantic distinction, case-marking no longer applies. These patterns in fact suggest that case-marking has both discriminatory and indexing aspects, but as integrated parts of their overall function rather than as in principle distinct functions. It seems that the case-markers in these languages function to discriminate, not between subjects and object, but between the participants of a fully transitive situation. In other words, the discriminatory function of case is here semantic rather than syntactic: the ergative and accusative casemarkers discriminate between semantic Agents and Patients rather than between syntactic subjects and objects. Thus we can say that the accusative case does indeed mark objects which are affected – that is, Patients – but this is only part of its function; in the canonical case, it marks a Patient which is opposed in the clause to a volitional Agent. This is supported by data from a neurolinguistic experiment by Schlesewsky and Bornkessel (2004), which shows that when presented with a clause-initial accusative-marked NP, speakers of German expect to find “an ideal Proto-Agent/Actor, i.e. an animate, nominative-marked argument” later in the clause (Schlesewsky and Bornkessel 2004 :1224). In other words, the accusative case is perceived as marking an entity which is affected by a volitional or controlling entity. Similar, we can understand the ergative case as marking Agent participants in events which affect a Patient. It is well known that the distinction between ergative and accusative casemarking patterns is defined with respect to clauses which are high in semantic transitivity – that is, clauses involving an Agent and a Patient argument. Shibatani



Chapter 7.  Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 

(1982) points out that with predicates which do not show a clear semantic distinction between a volitional, controlling Agent and a highly affected Patient, the ergative-accusative distinction breaks down. With stative predicates denoting ability, necessity, possession, and some types of emotion, that is, where there is no clear distinction between a volitional instigator and an affected entity, accusative and ergative languages often show identical case patterns, namely dative-nominative marking (see chapter 8): “As the transitivity of sentences declines with the choice of stative predicates, languages tend to exhibit deviations from both the ergative and the accusative pattern, and the contrast is lost” (Shibatani 1982 :108, my emphasis). In other words, the distinction between ergative and accusative casemarking systems is only clear-cut in fully transitive clauses; as the contrast between a controlling Agent and an affected Patient diminishes, so does the contrast between the case patterns in different types of systems. I have claimed that the canonical function of core case-marking is to discriminate between the participants in a fully transitive clause, that is, between Agents and Patients in maximal semantic distinction. It is important to note that the term “canonical” should not be taken to mean the same as “usual” or “frequent”, but rather represents a theoretical starting-point for the analysis of instances which show different properties. The hypothesis which such a definition of the “canonical function” implies is the following: All languages which case-mark either or both core arguments will apply this case-marking at least in clauses which conform to the semantic transitive prototype. What happens in clauses which deviate from the prototype – where there is no maximal distinction of arguments – is subject to crosslinguistic variation. Indeed, the examples discussed in 7.4 appear exceptional precisely because case-marking here seems to be restricted to situations with maximal semantic distinction of arguments only. Nevertheless, the analysis of these examples suggests a framework within which to approach the sources of variation in case-marking systems crosslinguistically. If the canonical function of core case-marking includes both indexing and discriminatory aspects, then either of these aspects might be elaborated on in noncanonical cases. That is, this analysis suggests two possible ways in which a language might extend case-marking to clauses which do not conform to the transitive prototype: The use of the core case-markers might be extended along the semantic dimension; that is, they would be used on arguments with a certain semantic specification, regardless of whether these are in maximal semantic opposition to another argument. Thus the ergative case might be used to mark agents or agent-like participants regardless of whether or not the other argument of the clause is a patient, or accusative case might be used for patient-like arguments whether or not these are construed as being acted on by a volitional agent.

 Prototypical Transitivity

Alternatively, their use might be extended along the discriminatory dimension, so that case-marking would apply in all or most cases where two arguments might need to be distinguished, regardless of whether or not they fulfill the criteria for semantic transitivity. Either of these dimensions may be extended to the point where they dominate the case system of a language more or less entirely; but most languages should probably be expected to combine both to some extent.

7.6 Semantic extensions The most obvious example of a semantic extension from the canonical situation described above would be one where ergative case is used to mark semantic Agents, or accusative case semantic Patients, regardless of the semantic properties of the other argument of the clause. Such extensions are fairly common and may apply to varying extents in different languages. The extreme case of semantic extension would be languages in which semantic Agents or Patients are consistently case-marked even where there is no second argument in the clause at all, and so nothing for the case-marked argument to be distinguished from. Such systems have been labelled active or split-intransitive; Dixon (1994) distinguishes betwen split-S and fluid-S systems according to whether the choice of “agentive” or “patientive” marking is fixed for each intransitive verb (split-S), or marking may vary for a single intransitive verb according to whether the action is conceived of as controlled or not (fluid-S). Split-intransitive systems appear to be most frequent in languages which mark argument relations directly on the verb rather than as case on argument nouns; but there are languages whose nominal case-markers follow a split-intransitive pattern. One such language is Laz, where the “ergative” suffix –k also appears on the “agent” of the intransitive verb in (7.14a); whereas the subject of (7.14b) is formally unmarked, patterning with the object of the transitive verb in (7.14c): (7.14) Laz (Kartvelian; Harris 1985 :52–53, glosses from Blake 2001): a. Bere-k ingars child-erg 3sg.cry ‘The child cries.’ b. Bere oxori-s doskidu child.nom house-dat 3sg.stay ‘The child stayed in the house.’ c. Baba-k meçcaps skiri-s cxeni father-erg 3sg.give.3sg.3sg child-dat horse.nom ‘The father gives a horse to his child.’



Chapter 7.  Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 

Note that there is variation between split-intransitive languages in exactly which intransitive events are coded as “agentive” or “patientive”; in the Siouan language Hidatsa, for example, the verb ‘cry’ belongs to the So class, that is, the class which takes patientive marking (Dixon 1994 :74). That is, the exact criteria for which participants are categorised as “agentive” and which as “patientive”, in non-obvious cases, vary between languages (cf. also Mithun 1991). This brings us to a further sense in which we can speak of “semantic extensions” of case-markers. In the canonical instance, ergative and accusative case mark Agent and Patients, respectively – that is, participants semantically specified as [+VOL, +INST, –AFF] and [–VOL, –INST, +AFF]. However, case-markers are rarely exclusively restricted to marking a single participant type. The point is summarised by Smith (1997 :131): “A participant’s role status will vary slightly according to the verb with which it occurs. As such, there are differing degrees of agenthood, experiencerhood, and patienthood, with one gradually fading into another... But case marking languages generally have only a small number of cases to signify information about a participant’s role status. Thus, a potentially infinite number of role gradations are coded by a small number of cases... This implies that cases are inherently polysemous, i.e. each case is associated with a number of senses, or role values, which range over the various role gradations within the boundaries delimiting one case from another. Different languages will mark the boundaries differently along the range of role values.”

The feature-decompositional analysis discussed in chapter 5 proposed a grouping of the “infinite number of role gradations” into a small number of classes based on properties assumed to be central to the definition of participant relations, with the explicit prediction that participants with the same semantic specification in terms of these properties should tend to receive similar encoding in language. However, few if any languages have distinct formal coding devices for each of these types, and so it is to be expected that some semantically distinct participant types will typically share the same formal construction in any given language. Case-marking categories should be understood as typically centering on semantically or conceptually salient participant relations (see also 8.4.1), though several relations may be covered by a single case-marker. The maximally semantically distinct – and therefore highly salient – relations Agent and Patient can be conceived of as the endpoints of a semantic continuum which may be divided up differently by the case systems of different languages. What is predicted from the feature analysis is that if a case-marker is extended beyond its canonical use, it should extend to participant types semantically similar to its core meaning. That is, the ergative case might be extended to other participant types which to some degree may be construed as “agentive”. To a certain

 Prototypical Transitivity

extent, the feature definitions provide a means of measuring such semantic similarity: two participant types are more similar semantically the more feature values they share. Thus Forces are more similar to Agents than are Instruments, because Forces have two “agentive” semantic features [+INST] and [–AFF], whereas Instruments have only one, [+INST]. Indeed, many languages allow ergative casemarking on Force but not Instrument participants; in the Australian language Yukulta, for instance, a Force may be the subject of an ergative clause, but Instruments are only permissible in clauses with an overt Agent; so the only acceptable rendering of ‘The stick hit the dog’ is (7.15b): (7.15) Yukulta (Australian, Tangkic; Keen 1983 :205): a. ŋity-iya-kanta kurala a pulmpa a fire-erg-tr.past scatter-ind grasshopper.abs ‘The fire scattered the grasshoppers.’ b. Pala a-lkanta ŋawuwa, uŋal-u u-ya hit.ind-they.tr.past dog.abs stick-com-erg ‘The stick hit the dog (lit.: ‘Having a stick, they hit the dog’).’

See also the Samoan examples in (5.11). It is likely that sharing positive feature values contributes more to such semantic similarity than sharing negative values; that is, participant types are more semantically similar if they have a ‘+’ in common than if they only have a ‘–’ in common. Without this assumption, we would have to take e.g. Neutrals and Instruments to be equally “Agent-like”, in that both share a single feature value with the Agent: [+INST] in the case of Instrument, [–AFF] in the case of Neutral. This is clearly an undesirable conclusion. Furthermore, the assumption seems reasonable as it is the positive feature values which define the nature of a participant’s involvement in the event; the negative values enter into the definitions of Agent and Patient as a consequence of the principle of maximal distinction. Thus, the ergative case may be extended to cover participants with other semantic specifications than that of Agent, if they are sufficiently similar to Agents semantically. What counts as “sufficiently similar” is obviously subject to crosslinguistic variation; while Yukulta excludes ergative case on Instruments, there are other languages, like Meithei, which allow it: (7.16) Meithei (Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman; Bhat and Ningomba 1997 :108, 112): a. Ma-nә u-du tu-hәl-lәm-mi he-erg tree-that fall-caus-compl-nfu ‘He had felled that tree.’



Chapter 7.  Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 

b. Siŋjәŋ-nә u-du tu-hәl-lәm-mi ax-erg tree-that fall-caus-compl-nfu ‘(He) had felled that tree with an ax.’

Thus as far as case-marking is concerned, languages show different cutoff points on a cline of semantic transitivity, defined by the Agent-Patient opposition; the more the properties of the arguments of a clause deviate from this specification, the less likely they are to show canonically transitive, ergative or accusative casemarking. As we have seen, it is not necessarily just the position of the case-marked argument itself on this semantic cline that is relevant, but its semantic distance from the other participant; as we saw in 7.4, it is not necessarily enough to trigger ergative case-marking that an A participant is an Agent, if it is not opposed to a semantic Patient. This also provides an explanation for the Jakaltek data in example (7.5). Forces can be the subjects of transitive clauses in Jakaltek, but only if the other participant is a true semantic Patient. That is, Jakaltek tolerates a certain reduction in the overall semantic transitivity of the clause, in that one of the participants may deviate somewhat from the prototype. However, if the second argument also shows such a deviation, as with the object of ‘close’ in (7.5b) which is essentially unaffected, a formally transitive clause can no longer be used. The fact that case-markers can show such semantic extensions has sometimes been used as an argument against a semantically based analysis of case-markers. For example, Comrie (1978) argues against the idea that the ergative case should be seen as a marker of control or agentivity, that is, that it correlates with a semantic property of the argument that it marks rather than being a purely syntactic device triggered by certain formal properties of clauses. He cites several different kinds of examples as supposed counterevidence for this assumption. Firstly, the fact that many languages extend the ergative case to arguments which are not Agents: (7.17) Basque (Isolate; Lafitte 1962 cited in Comrie 1978 :357): a. Herra-k z-erabiltza hatred-erg you-move ‘Hatred inspires you.’ b. Ur-handia -k d-erabilka eihara river -erg it-move mill.abs ‘The river works the mill.’

Secondly, the occurrence of split ergativity on the basis of tense/aspect, where the same noun phrase will appear in either the ergative or the absolutive case depending on the tense and/or aspect of the verb, though no difference in agentivity of the subject is evident. Thirdly, the fact that under indefinite object deletion (see chap-

 Prototypical Transitivity

ter 6), some languages omit the ergative marker when the object is absent, even though the subject must be interpreted as equally agentive in both instances. This is illustrated with the following sentences from Tongan (cf. 4.3.2): (7.18) Tongan (Austronesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian; Churchward 1953 cited in Comrie 1978 :358) a. Na’e inu ‘a e kava ‘e Sione past drink abs the kava erg John ‘John drank the kava.’ b. Na’e inu ‘a Sione past drink abs John ‘John drank.’

Fourthly, less affected or generic objects often trigger formally intransitive constructions with absolutive subjects, even though the subject is still semantically agentive. Thus in Chukchi (Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Russia), a generic or nonreferential object may be incorporated into the verb, leading to absolutive rather than ergative marking on the subject: (7.19) Chukchi (Comrie 1978 :364): a. Tumg-e nantәwatәn kupre-n friend-erg they.set.it net-abs ‘The friends set the net.’ b. Tumg-әt kopra-ntәwatg’at friend-abs net-they.set ‘The friends set the net/engaged in net-setting.’

Under the present analysis of case-marking and semantic transitivity, none of these objections are valid. The fact that in Basque, the ergative case may be extended to cover Forces, does not invalidate the assumption that the core function of the ergative is to mark semantic Agents. The fact that the A arguments of two-participant clauses are Agents whether the clause is perfective or not is no guarantee that ergative case-marking will apply in both instances, as we saw in the examples above where ergative marking depended on properties of the object. As imperfective aspect does not include the effect on the object in its framing of the event (5.6.3), objects of imperfective clauses cannot strictly speaking be seen as Patients, and therefore ergative marking may not apply (see further discussion of split ergativity in 7.8 below). The Tongan example in (7.18) is a frequently-cited one in discussions of the discriminatory function of the ergative: the Agent in Tongan, it is argued, is only overtly marked when it is in opposition to an overt object argument. In (7.18b),



Chapter 7.  Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 

although the subject is still an agent, there is no object and therefore no need to overtly mark the subject; and so the ergative case-marker must be considered as a device for argument discrimination rather than a marker of semantic agents. The flaw in this argument is that the subject in (7.18ab) is not in fact an Agent; it is an Affected Agent. Like in Samoan (4.3.2), the possibility of an agentive reading of (7.18b) is the exception to the general rule; for most Tongan verbs, a single absolutive argument with a semantically transitive verb can only be understood as the patient (Churchward 1953). That is, for canonically transitive verbs such as ‘kill’ or ‘break’, a pattern such as that demonstrated in (7.18) is not possible; with such verbs, the Agent would require ergative marking even without an overt object: (7.20)

Tongan (Churchward 1953 :71): Na’e fai ‘e Sione past do erg John ‘John did (it).’

Thus the case alternation in (7.18) is a consequence of the affected-agent semantics of ‘drink’ and does not reflect the fundamentally discriminatory nature of the ergative case; see the discussion of similar data for Samoan in chapter 4. Of course, this does not preclude the possibility of the ergative also having a discriminatory function, as we take the canonical function of core case-marking to include a discriminatory as well as a semantic component. But the Tongan data is no argument against a semantically based analysis of the ergative. The lack of ergative case in clauses with generic or nonreferential objects are just another instance of the patterns exemplified in 7.4; some languages restrict ergative marking to clauses with clearly patientive arguments. This is all the more obvious in the Chuckhi examples in (7.19), where the low-individuation O is incorporated into the verb phrase in a formally intransitive construction parallel to those discussed in 2.3.2. A low degree of semantic distinctness leads to a low degree of syntactic distinctness, as noted in 3.3.

7.7 Discriminatory extensions While purely semantically oriented case-marking systems do exist, as exemplified above, it is likely that most languages show a discriminatory dimension to their case systems, to varying extents. Finnish, Waskia and Yuwaalaraay, mentioned in 7.2 above, are examples of languages where the discriminatory function of case may override its semantic function in certain instances, even though the casemarkers in these languages must still be taken to have semantic content; the Finn-

 Prototypical Transitivity

ish accusative, for example, is clearly associated with Patient objects, as illustrated in (3.7). Extending the function of case-markers along the discriminatory dimension would ultimately lead to case-marking being employed only when there is a need to discriminate between two participants, regardless of their semantic specification. A language which comes close to this description is Malayalam, as pointed out by de Swart (2003). In Malayalam, animate objects take overt accusative case-marking, while inanimate objects normally do not: (7.21) Malayalam (Dravidian, Southern; Asher and Kumari 1997 :203) a. Avan ku iye a iccu he child.acc beat.past ‘He beat the child.’ b. Avan pustakam vaayiccu he book read.past ‘He read the book.’

However, it is possible to case-mark inanimate objects when the subject is also inanimate; though such marking is only used when there is a chance of genuine ambiguity, that is, when real-world knowledge does not provide sufficient information to determine which participant is the A and which is the O: (7.22) Malayalam (Dravidian, Southern; Asher and Kumari 1997 :204) a. Tiiyyә ku il na ippiccu fire hut destroy.past ‘The fire destroyed the hut.’ b. Kappal tiramaalaka e bheediccu ship wave.pl.acc split.past ‘The ship broke through the waves.’ c. Tiramaalaka kappaline bheediccu wave. pl ship.acc split.past ‘The waves split the ship.’

Another case-marking system which seems mainly geared towards discrimination is that of Kolyma Yukaghir (Maslova 2003). As long as A is third person, the O of a Yukaghir clause takes the accusative case. However, if A is 1st or 2nd person, 3rd-person Os are unmarked; 1st and 2nd person pronouns, on the other hand, have special accusative forms used only in combination with 1st or 2nd person A; that is, when overt discrimination is required.



Chapter 7.  Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 

(7.23) Kolyma Yukaghir (Yukaghir; Maslova 2003 :89–95) a. Tet kimnī met-kele kudede-m your whip me-acc kill-tr:3sg ‘Your whip has killed me.’ b. Met mēmē iŋī I bear be.afraid(tr:1sg) ‘I am afraid of the bear.’ c. Met tet-ul kudede-t I you-acc kill-fut(tr:1sg) ‘I will kill you.’

7.8 Split ergativity The generalisations made above concerning the canonical functions of core casemarking do not necessarily carry over to so-called split-ergative systems. In the following I will outline an approach to split ergativity within the framework of transitivity defined in terms of distinctness of participants. There are three types of so-called split-ergative systems commonly recognised in the literature: verb-split (or split-intransitive), tense/aspect split, and NP-split. In addition, Dixon (1994: 101–104) describes cases of what he calls ‘main’ vs. ‘subordinate’ clause split, but suggest that this type can be related to tense/aspect and NP-type splits, and that one should probably expect different types of patterning depending on which type of subordinate clause is involved. This type of split is fairly rare and poorly understood; it will not be further discussed here. The basic criterion for categorising a putative split system within the current framework is the type of marking found in fully transitive clauses, as defined in 3.2.6. If the variation in case-marking can be related directly to variations in semantic transitivity, there seems to be little basis for calling the system “split-ergative” as opposed to just ergative with few or no possibilities of extending the use of the ergative case beyond the canonical transitive clause. A second criterion is the type of marking found when ergative case does not apply: does the ergative marking alternate with accusative marking, or is the alternative no overt marking at all? In the latter case, it is again not clear that the system should be understood as “split” rather than simply an ergative case-marking system with specific restrictions on the use of the ergative case. On these criteria, so-called tense/aspect-split systems may be analysed simply as fairly restrictive ergative-marking systems. In this type of systems, it is always the case that ergative patterning is found in the past tense or perfective aspect,

 Prototypical Transitivity

while other tenses and aspects may show accusative patterning. In 5.6.3, aspect was seen to influence semantic transitivity in that the imperfective aspect does not make explicit reference to the effects of an action, meaning that the object of an imperfectively encoded event cannot be construed as affected. Similarly, an event referred to in the present tense is not presented as concluded, and therefore has not yet achieved any effects on an object. It is unclear to what extent systems which restrict ergative marking to the past tense or perfective aspect combine this marking with overt accusative case in the present/imperfective. Dixon (1994 :100) states that “there is generally positive marking for A function in past/perfective, and for O in non-past/imperfective – creating a genuine ‘accusative’ versus ‘ergative’ split”. However, this is clearly not a necessary feature of such systems. For example, Burushaski shows ergative casemarking in past-based tenses but does not distinguish formally between A, S and O in nonpast tenses (Lorimer 1935, Dixon 1994) In Hindi, marking of A follows the perfective/imperfective parameter, with overt ergative marking only in the perfective aspect. Marking of O, on the other hand, is independent of aspect, depending instead on the definiteness and animacy of the NP in question (Mohanan 1994). In such instances, then, we appear to be dealing with a system applying ergative case only in transitive clauses in a fairly strict sense. The generally assumed explanation for instances where ergative case in the past/perfective is complemented by accusative case in the nonpast/imperfective is in terms of the identification of S with O in completed events (where only the effect of the event is still in evidence), but with A in non-completed events (where no effect is yet evident and the action must rather be construed in terms of its instigation by a controlling agent). This proposal is in principle compatible with the analysis of case-marking proposed above, in that overt case-marking can be understood as indicating a markedness pattern reflecting a particular construal of a transitive event. The fact that the controlling agent is the formally unmarked participant in an accusative pattern could be taken to indicate that accusative systems construe transitive events primarily in terms of their initiation by a controlling participant, with the effect on a distinct participant viewed as the ‘marked phase’ of the event, the property which distinguishes transitive from (formally unmarked) intransitive clauses. Conversely, ergative marking could be seen as taking the effects of an event as its main characterising property (cf. Shaumyan 1986), and its instigation by a controlling agent as the marked property unique to transitive situations. In a split system on the basis of tense/aspect, one would then expect the “unmarked effect” pattern in the past/perfective and the “unmarked control” pattern in the nonpast/imperfective, which is what is typically found. Verb-split or split-intransitive systems were discussed above as systems where the semantic function of case-marking has been extended to cover all cases of



Chapter 7.  Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 

participants considered to fall under a certain semantic specification, regardless of whether there is another argument from which they might need to be distinguished. In this sense, they are not qualitatively different from languages where case has both discriminatory and indexing aspects, as discussed above; they only differ in that the semantic dimension has come to dominate the system entirely. This leaves us with NP-split systems, which from the current point of view are of a rather different nature than the other two. NP-split systems case-mark participants differently depending either on the formal class of the argument NP – that is, whether it is a pronoun or a lexical noun (sometimes with a further subdivision of nouns into proper nouns or common nouns) – or on the nature of its referent; whether the referent is human, non-human animate, or inanimate. The categories of NPs which may condition this type of split have been shown to form a hierarchy (Silverstein 1976), where any possible cutoff point corresponds to a split found in some language. The hierarchy is variously referred to as the Nominal Hierarchy or the Animacy Hierarchy, as the main factor influencing the ranking of the elements in the hierarchy appears to be the degree of animacy of the participant in question. I will here employ the more neutral term Nominal Hierarchy. (7.24) Nominal Hierarchy (adapted from Dixon 1994 :85) 1st person > 2nd person > 3rd person > proper nouns > human > pronouns

pronouns

pronouns

animate > inanimate

common nouns CNs

CNs

There has been some discussion as to whether 1st and 2nd person pronouns should be ranked with respect to each other in the manner represented here, or whether they should in fact be taken to be at the same level of the hierarchy crosslinguistically; see Dixon (1994 :88–90) for some arguments in favour of the ranking of 1st person over 2nd. It should be noted, however, that a very common type of split distinguishes 1st and 2nd person on the one hand from 3rd on the other. NP splits practically always yield accusative case-marking in the left-hand part of the hierarchy and ergative case-marking in the right-hand part. Thus, for example, if the split is between pronouns and nouns, the pronouns will be unmarked when functioning as transitive A while nouns will be overtly marked in this function; conversely, nouns will be unmarked in transitive O function while pronouns will be marked in this function. If the conditioning factor is the animacy of the NP referent, human, sometimes also nonhuman animate, NPs will be unmarked in A function, while inanimate NPs will take ergative case-marking; the opposite will tend to be the case for object marking. NP splits are generally explained by appeal to economy: “It is plainly most natural and economical to ‘mark’ a participant when it is in an unaccustomed role” (Dixon 1994). This explanation is similar to that discussed for differential object marking in 7.2.: when human or animate participants are As and inanimate, inert

 Prototypical Transitivity

objects are Os, case-marking is superfluous because identification of the participants with their respective syntactic and semantic relations is unproblematic. In cases where “agent-like” participants are in O function, or where participants considered to be unlikely agents are in A function, overt marking is employed to facilitate this identification. This type of account bases itself on a notion of potentiality for agency where humans are more likely to be agents than other animates, which again are more likely to be agents than inanimates. The question is then why some human participants should be more likely to be cast as agents than others, since the Nominal Hierarchy does not simply rank human participants above all others, but has 1st person pronouns outranking 2nd person, which again outranks 3rd person. In order to explain this it is assumed that the speaker will look upon himself as most typically agentive: “In the speaker’s view of the world, as it impinges on him and as he describes it in his language, he will be the quintessential agent... the speaker will think in terms of his doing things to other people to a much greater extent than of having things done to him” (Dixon 1979 :85–86, my emphasis) For more discussion and alternative analyses of NP splits, see e.g. Wierzbicka (1981), DeLancey (1981), Goddard (1982). From the current perspective, what distinguishes NP-split marking from other types of system is that it allows for the absence of any overt case-marking in semantically transitive clauses. This is clearly different from “pure” ergative and accusative systems, where case-marking applies at least in fully transitive clauses; it is also different from both verb-split and tense-aspect split languages, both of which overtly mark at least one argument of a fully transitive clause. In NP-split languages, however, we get a lack of overt marking where neither A nor O fulfills the criteria for case-marking; that is, where A is situated at the higher end of the Nominal Hierarchy and so not eligible for ergative marking, while the O is situated at the lower end and so does not take accusative marking. (7.25)

Guugu Yimidhirr (Australian, Pama-Nyungan; Haviland 1979 :125): Ngayu nhanu minha gundil bulii=ma-ni 1sg.nom 2sg.gen.abs meat.abs egg.abs fall=caus-past ‘I dropped your egg.’

(7.26) Yidiny (Australian, Pama-Nyungan; Dixon 1977 :256, glosses from Comrie 1986 :96): ŋa dyi bana wuŋaŋ we.nom water.abs will.drink ‘We will drink water.’



Chapter 7.  Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 

Since NP-split languages do not necessarily require either A or O to be overtly marked in a fully transitive clause, a relevant question is: what exactly does get marked in such systems? While ergative and accusative marking in NP-split systems are both governed by the Nominal Hierarchy, they do not always work according to the exact same semantic criteria – that is, there is often an overlap in the middle of the hierarchy so that some types of NPs will take overt marking in both A and O position. For instance, in Cashinawa (Panoan), ergative case-marking is found on 3rd person pronouns and all nouns – in other words, all third-person participants take ergative marking. Accusative case, on the other hand, is found on all pronouns but not on nouns (Dixon 1994 :86). Both of these subsets of the NP hierarchy – pronouns taking accusative case, third-person participants taking ergative case – happen to include 3rd person pronouns, which consequently show a tripartite marking pattern. Such overlaps in marking, resulting in tripartite marking for parts of the Nominal Hierarchy, are fairly common in NP-split systems. This casts some doubt on the analysis of such systems in terms of economy; as noted above, the motivation generally assumed for NP-splits is that it is most economical to mark only participants in “unaccustomed roles”. But tripartite marking is anything but economical; indeed, the general consensus is that tripartite systems are rare crosslinguistically precisely because they are uneconomical. Yet they turn up quite frequently in some part of NP-split systems, suggesting that economy is unlikely to be the only factor motivating such systems. The cutoff points for ergative and accusative marking do not vary randomly across the Nominal Hierarchy. As noted by Goddard (1982), accusative case-marking in split systems seems nearly always to be conditioned by the semantic factor of humanness or animacy. Accusative case extends through the pronominal system and optionally into the set of proper names and kin terms in Yidiny (Dixon 1994 :87); both pronouns, proper names and kin terms typically have human referents. Duungidjawu uses accusative case on pronouns, human-referring nouns, and some nouns referring to higher animates such as dogs (Wurm 1976). Ritharngu similarly employs the accusative for pronouns and nouns referring to humans and “intelligent animals” (Heath 1976b, Comrie 1989), as does Djapu (Morphy 1983) and Uradhi (Crowley 1983). In Nyawaygi (Dixon 1983) the split runs through the category of 3rd person pronouns; these take accusative case only when referring to humans and sometimes animals. Ergative marking, however, shows a slightly different tendency. Unlike accusative marking, which in these systems generally applies to semantically defined classes of NPs (human- and/or animate-referring), ergative marking tends to refer to formal rather than semantic classes of nominals. Thus, in NP-split systems, ergative case is found either on nouns as opposed to pronouns (which one might

 Prototypical Transitivity

consider a grammaticalisation of the animate-inanimate distinction) or on 3rd person pronouns and nouns as opposed to 1st and 2nd person pronouns. Where there is no overlap between accusative and ergative case-marking, the split tends to occur either between 1st and 2nd person pronouns on the one hand and 3rd person participants on the other, such as in Ngiyambaa (Australian, Pama-Nyungan; Donaldson 1980) and the Salish languages Lummi and Squamish (Jelinek and Demers 1983), or between pronouns and nouns as in Guugu Yimidhirr (Haviland 1979) and Kugu Nganhcara (Smith and Johnson 2000). The overt case-markers in split-NP systems, then, reflect inherent properties of argument NPs rather than the relational properties – Agency and Patienthood – assumed above to represent the core meanings of case-markers in non-split systems. But of course, the potential of different kinds of participants for showing certain relational properties is restricted by their inherent properties; this is the basis for the traditional analysis of NP-split systems as reflecting potential for agency. A case system which exploits the link between inherent and relational properties may be grounded in processing economy; by referring to the participants’ inherent properties rather than directly to their relational properties, one avoids having to categorise the role a participant plays in every individual situation, but can instead classify participants according to whether or not they are capable of fulfilling, or likely to fulfill, the criteria for Agent- and Patienthood. Of the three semantic properties which define Agents and Patients, two are reinterpretable as inherent properties. All types of entities are in principle capable of being affected (though we may perceive some kinds of entities as more saliently affected than others, cf. 5.5), and so it is difficult to assess a participant’s “capacity for affectedness” on the basis of its inherent properties. Volitionality and instigation, on the other hand, are properties which some entities are capable of but others are not. Thus, for example, an inanimate entity cannot be an Agent, because it is inherently incapable of volition and instigation. A human being, on the other hand, has the capacity for both volition and instigation and so is fairly likely to fulfill the criteria for Agenthood. Reversely, an inanimate entity is more likely to fulfill the criteria for Patienthood than a human or nonhuman animate because Patients are required to be nonvolitional and noninstigating, and these properties are inherent to inanimates; animate participants, on the other hand, have the capacity for instigating events and so are more likely than inanimates not to be proper Patients, even if they are cast as the O of a transitive clause. In a simplified “animacy hierarchy” referring only to the distinction between humans, non-human animates, and inanimates, we can represent participants’ potential for volition and instigation as follows:

(7.27)

Chapter 7.  Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 

Animacy hierarchy: human > animate > inanimate [+VOL] [–VOL] [–VOL] [+INST] [+INST] [–INST]

Compare these feature values to those defining the categories of Agent and Patient. The category “human” fulfills the requirements for Agenthood, being [+VOL] and [+INST]; the other two violate one or both of these requirements. The category “inanimate”, on the other hand, fills the criteria for Patienthood, being [–VOL] and [–INST], while one or both of these are violated by the other two categories. Recall that in NP-split systems, accusative case-marking tends to apply to animate-referring NPs, while ergative case-marking applies to nouns as opposed to pronouns – that is, all nominals except those which refer specifically to humans. In other words, accusative case-marking applies to all nominals except those whose inherent properties conform to the requirements for Patienthood, whereas ergative case-marking applies to all nominals except those whose inherent properties conform to the requirements for Agenthood: (7.28) NP-split case-marking: human > animate > inanimate [+VOL] [–VOL] [–VOL] [+INST] [+INST] [–INST] acc erg

What is marked in such a system, then, are participants which are being presented as participating in a transitive situation, but whose inherent properties are in conflict with those defining the Agent or Patient properties. In other words, an argument gets marked when it is being cast as agentive, i.e. as the A of a transitive clause, but is not a proper Agent in the sense defined in chapter 3, being incapable of volition and/or instigation; or when it is being cast as Patientive but is unlikely to be a proper Patient because it is not inherently nonvolitional and noninstigating. The analysis of NP-split systems as overtly marking participants whose inherent properties are in conflict with the requirements for full semantic transitivity explains in a simple manner why such systems consistently work on the basis of animacy rather than of definiteness, a property which is seen to govern other types of case-marking alternations such as differential object marking. Definiteness is not a property of the participants in a situation, but of the NPs which encode them. Definiteness reflects the referential status of participants in discourse, but it

 Prototypical Transitivity

says nothing about the real-world, discourse-independent properties of the participants, and therefore it cannot predict anything about the potential of these participants to fill the roles required in a fully transitive situation. It also explains why this type of system tends to involve marking of both some types of subjects and some types of objects, as opposed to “differential subject marking” alone. If the motivation for NP-splits is to mark participants which are being construed as participating in a transitive situation, even though their inherent properties actually conflict with those defining such a situation, then we would expect such a system to mark any participant which shows such properties – either an A argument which cannot be reliably assumed to be volitional, or an O argument with a capacity for volition and/or instigation. That is, “differential subject marking” of this type generally occurs as part of a larger system which case-mark an argument if its inherent properties deviate from the transitive prototype, whether this argument is an A or an O. Ergative marking of only controlling but not noncontrolling A arguments, on the other hand, is simply a consequence of the core meaning of the ergative case-marker in consistently ergative languages as marking the A participant in a transitive situation, and is therefore independent of any marking of O. This appears to be a fairly strong generalisation. Exceptions exist, but they are rare; Cavineña (Tacanan) has a complex system of marking vs. non-marking of A, basically consistent with the analysis of NP-split marking as marking “non-Agent” As, but no corresponding O marking (Camp 1985); according to Comrie (1981 :211), South Caucasian and some North Caucasian languages show ergative marking for 3rd but not 1st and 2nd person, while as I understand it no object marking occurs. Dixon (1994 :89) notes that Nadëb (Maku, Brazil) shows ergative marking for 2nd and 3rd but not 1st person, but does not mention whether or not the language also has object marking. Some languages, then, do show overt marking of only one participant when this participant deviates from the transitive prototype; as an overall generalisation, however, such marking can be expected to apply to both participants, A and O.

7.9 A note on case-marking labels The preceding discussion employed terms like ‘ergative’ and ‘accusative’ fairly uncritically for types of morphemes which have sometimes been considered to have fundamentally different functions. Dixon (1994 :30–31) argues that traditional case labels such as nominative, accusative, absolutive and ergative should be restricted to languages where the case-markers in question indicate syntactic relations, that is, when the markers is used for an argument in a certain syntactic posi-



Chapter 7.  Maximal semantic distinction in core case-marking 

tion (intransitive subject, transitive subject, or object). He thus considers that essentially semantically determined case markers such as –nә and –bu in Meithei, which were here glossed ‘ERG’ and ‘ACC’ respectively, should receive distinct labels as an indication of their primarily semantic status. I have argued that the canonical function of core case-markers crucially involves a semantic component, although individual languages may extend the use of these markers in ways which may or may not be semantically motivated. I therefore see no problem with applying the same labels both to case-markers in systems where the semantic dimension is clearly dominant, and in systems where it is less so. I would propose to define the terms ‘ergative’ and ‘accusative’ as follows: An ergative case-marker is an overt marker which is used on the A argument of a semantically transitive clause – regardless of what additional uses it may have, and whether these uses are motivated primarily by semantic or discriminatory concerns. Similarly, an accusative case-marker is an overt marker applied to the O argument of a semantically transitive clause, regardless of its other uses. These definitions do leave the question of how the case-markers in NP-split systems should be labelled. It is a crucial property of these markers that they are not used in semantically fully transitive clauses, but rather to indicate that participants which deviate from the characteristics of Agents or Patients are being cast as subjects or objects of formally transitive constructions. In light of the preceding discussion, does it make sense to include such case-markers under the labels ‘ergative’ and ‘accusative’? The answer to this question depends on which criteria for similarity should be considered most important. From a purely structural point of view, the A marker in “regular” ergative and NP-split languages clearly have similar properties: they function to overtly mark an A argument, as opposed to S and O. The only difference is that ergative languages employ this marker on all NPs in this position, whereas NP-split languages use it only for some classes of NPs. On the other hand, the markers in NP-split languages do not apply under exactly the circumstances where “regular” ergative or accusative marking does apply, which suggests that these markers are functionally and semantically very different and should not simply be conceived of as variations on a single theme of “ergativity”. From a semantic point of view, it is clear that a marker whose basic function is to signal that “this NP is an Agent of a transitive clause” and one whose function is to signal that “this NP is not an Agent even though it is in A function” cannot unproblematically be assigned to the same category. On the other hand, treating them as entirely distinct obscures the structural similarities just discussed: both markers apply exclusively to A arguments, albeit in different circumstances. Furthermore, even in NP-split languages, “ergative” case may reflect some degree of agentivity. For instance, in Yidiny, an inanimate A participant may take the

 Prototypical Transitivity

ergative case if it is perceived as ultimately “responsible” for the event, that is, if it is construed as a Force rather than an Instrument; but it takes instrumental case if it is merely an Instrument, i.e. it is being manipulated by another entity; cf. the Hare data in 5.3.3: (7.29) Yidiny (Australian, Pama-Nyungan; Dixon 1977 :282–283): a. ŋa a dyina baŋga:ldu gunda:dyi u I.acc foot.abs axe.erg cut.:di.past ‘The axe cut my foot (= I cut myself accidentally on the axe).’ b. ŋayu baŋga:lda gunda:dyi u I.nom axe.ins cut.:di.past ‘I cut myself (on purpose) with an axe.’

That is, the A-marking case in an NP-split system does not simply mark a nonAgent; it marks a non-Agent which is being ascribed certain agentive properties. On the other hand, it does not apply to Agents proper, that is, to volitional instigators. Both semantically and structurally, then, the “ergative” case categories in “regular” ergative and NP-split languages show some similarities and some differences. In deciding how to label these similar but not identical categories one must of course also take into account the troublesome matter of habit and convention: the linguistic community has been treating both of these phenomena under the heading of “ergativity” for decades, and attempting to change such well-entrenched terminology is no simple task. For this reason I have in the discussion above kept to the traditional use of ‘ergative case-marker’ as meaning ‘overt A marker’ regardless of which kind of As are being marked. Ideally, however, the analysis of split ergativity proposed here would call for a reconsideration of the terminology and a distinction between the term employed to mean ‘marker of A in fully transitive clauses’ and that employed for ‘marker of A deviating from the Agent prototype’.

chapter 8

Experiencers and the dative

8.1 Introduction The previous chapter discussed case-marking in transitive clauses defined in terms of the maximal semantic distinction of arguments. This chapter will look at a particular type of clause which does not show such maximal semantic distinction, namely clauses of experience. It will argue that the variation typically found in the encoding of experience events, both within and across languages, derives from the fact that experience events are typically indeterminate with respect to the degree to which their participants can be perceived as being in control of or affected by the event. That is, the more difficult it is to conceptualise a two-participant event in terms of a clear semantic distinction between its arguments, the more we would expect the formal encoding of this event to deviate from that found with events which do show such a clear semantic distinction; and this is exactly what we find with clauses of experience. A formal category often associated with clauses of relatively low transitivity, including experience clauses, is the dative case. I will present evidence that the core function of the dative case is as a marker of Volitional Undergoers – [+VOL, –INST, +AFF] participants. This participant type can be argued to represent a third conceptually salient category, in addition to the maximally semantically distinct Agent and Patient; and the dative case is typically used crosslinguistically to mark participants which are, in one way or another, affected by virtue of being sentient.

8.2 The semantic diversity of experience events Experiencer arguments – those which undergo a mental, emotional or sensory experience of some kind – vary greatly in formal encoding both within and across languages. In English, some experiencers are encoded as subjects of transitive clauses (I like the dog), while others are subjects of extended intransitive clauses (I’m afraid of the dog) or objects of transitives (The dog frightened me). In Russian, too, some experiencer arguments appear as transitive subjects, while others are encoded as objects in the accusative case, and yet others take the dative case (Croft

 Prototypical Transitivity

1993 :56). Many South-East Asian languages assign dative case to the experiencer arguments of certain verbs, though in other respects these arguments may show subject-like behaviour (Verma and Mohanan 1990a). A number of proposals have been made as to how this variation is to be analysed. Croft (1991, 1993) distinguishes between four types of what he calls “mental verbs”: causative mental verbs, where the stimulus triggers a change of state in the experiencer (please); mental activity verbs (think, consider); inchoative mental verbs, which denote the inception of a mental state, though without any necessary reference to an external cause of this change of state (get angry, get bored); and mental state verbs, involving no change and no “transmission of force” (like, know). He argues that only mental state verbs should allow typological variation in subject and object assignment to the stimulus and experiencer arguments. Causative mental verbs should always have the stimulus as subject and experiencer as object, as the former is seen as causing a change of state in the latter; mental activity verbs ascribe a degree of control to the experiencer, which should therefore always be subject; while inchoative mental verbs should always take experiencer subjects because their semantics includes only the segment of the causal chain that starts with the experiencer; the stimulus, which is the initial element of the causal chain describing the event as a whole, is not referred to directly by the verb. The subject, therefore, should be the first element of the causal chain which is included in the verb meaning: the experiencer. Counterexamples to this prediction are not difficult to find. A verb like ‘see’ is categorised by Croft as basically a mental state verb, but with a derived inchoative interpretation (Croft 1991 :218); the latter accounts for examples such as I suddenly saw John. Whether seeing can in fact be described as a state is debatable; the verb ‘see’ fails certain tests for stativity such as the ability to cooccur with durational adverbs (for an hour) or expressions such as spend an hour Xing (Dowty 1979). In many respects it patterns more like achievements, which do not readily occur with for-phrases or spend an hour-phrases, and which, like see, are unacceptable as complements of stop or finish (*John stopped/finished seeing the cat.) However, even if ‘see’ is taken to have a stative as well as an inchoative (achievement) reading, the prediction following from Croft’s analysis is that variation in experiencer encoding with this verb should be restricted to cases where it has a stative rather than an inchoative reading. In fact, quite the opposite appears to be the case in some languages. For example, Klaiman (1981b) presents the following data from Bengali: (8.1) Bengali (Indo-European, Indic; Klaiman 1981b:128): a. Se ek i sundor meye-ke dekhlo he a pretty girl-obj saw ‘He saw a pretty girl.’



Chapter 8.  Experiencers and the dative 

b. Ek i sundor meye (ke) taar cokhe po lo a pretty girl obj his eye.loc fell ‘He spotted a pretty girl.’

Granted, this is an instance of two different verbal lexemes with corresponding different argument structures, rather than one single verb with alternative argument-encoding possibilities. Note, however, that the choice between daekh- ‘see’ and cokhe pa - ‘see, spot’ (lit. ‘fall into the eye’) is only possible with what Croft terms the inceptive reading of ‘see’. If constructed with an expression of continuous directed attention, which forces a stative (or perhaps rather an activity) rather than an inceptive meaning, the clause with cokhe pa - becomes ungrammatical, and only daekh- is possible: (8.2) Bengali (Klaiman 1981b:128): a. Se ek i sundir meye-ke taakiye dekhlo he a pretty girl-obj stare.cp see ‘He stared at a pretty girl.’ b. * Taakiye ek i sundor meye (ke) taar cokhe po lo stare.cp a pretty girl obj his eye.loc fell

The related language Bhojpuri (Verma 1990) similarly shows an alternation between ‘see’ interpreted as controlled, and ‘see accidentally, catch sight of ’. Once again it is the ‘accidental’ seeing which takes an oblique experiencer: (8.3) Bhojpuri (Indo-European, Indic; Verma 1990 :93): a. Ham okaraa ke dekhnii b. Hamraa uu laukal I.nom he acc saw.tr I.obl he.nom seen-intr ‘I saw him.’ ‘I happened to see him.’

‘Happening to see someone’ is not readily interpretable a state; rather, it constitutes a change of state, where something comes into the experiencer’s field of vision which was not there before. (8.3b), then, has an inceptive rather than a stative reading, but nevertheless takes an oblique experiencer. Further examples can be found in Tibeto-Burman languages. Kathmandu Newari allows either the genitive or the dative case for the experiencer argument of some inchoative verbs of experience: (8.4)

Kathmandu Newari (Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman; Bickel 2004 :88): Mirā-yā/-yāta tyānhul-a. Mira-gen/-dat tired-past.disjunct.ag ‘Mira became tired.’

 Prototypical Transitivity

A parallel construction with a dative experiencer is found in Lhomi, from a different subgroup of Tibeto-Burman (Central Tibetan): (8.5)

Lhomi (Versalainen and Versalainen 1980 cited in Bickel 2004 :82): ‘phica-la ŋiccok ‘čap-soŋ child-dat tired become-aor.disjunct ‘The child became extremely tired.’

According to Narasimhan (1998), dative-subject constructions in Hindi denote either states or achievements. It is quite clear, then, that variation in experiencer encoding, either language-internally or crosslinguistically, is not restricted to mental state verbs. Bossong (1998) describes the semantics of experience constructions as involving an “inversion of the semantic vector”: in prototypical transitive clauses, the action emanates from an active, animate participant and is directed at another participant which may or may not be animate, whereas in experience events, the obligatorily animate participant is rather the target or endpoint of the process denoted by the verb. There are two possible ways for a language to tackle such semantic inversion, argues Bossong: either by generalising the prototypical twoparticipant pattern – the transitive clause – to include such anomalous cases; or by inversion, that is, having a distinct formal expression for experience clauses which reflects their particular semantic properties. The probability of a generalising strategy being used is greater the more agentive the experiencer is, that is, the more it is in conscious control of the experience event and thus resembles the Agent of a fully transitive event. For example, Bossong considers the experiencers of verbs of cognition and perception, such as remember, forget, see, to show a fairly high degree of agentivity because the experiencer must direct his/her attention towards the object of cognition or perception, whereas verbs of physical sensation or reaction are to a much lesser degree under the control of the experiencer, and consequently tend to be encoded in constructions other than transitive clauses. The latter point highlights a difficulty with the traditional label “experiencer”: it is a fairly heterogeneous category, and does not correspond to a single participant type as defined by the semantic features of volitionality, instigation and affectedness. Consider the following examples: (8.6) Kannada (Dravidian, Southern; Bhat 1991 :51): a. Avanu a:keyannu no: ida he.nom her.acc looked ‘He looked at her.’



Chapter 8.  Experiencers and the dative 

b. Avanige a:keyannu no: i ho:yitu he.dat her.acc look.pp went ‘He looked at her accidentally.’

The difference between these two examples is that in (8.6a), the experiencer argument is taken to volitionally instigate the event of looking, while in (8.6b) his volition is only engaged to the extent that his perceptual faculties must be involved for the event to take place, but the actual instigation of the “looking event” is not attributed to the experiencer. In other words, the experiencer of (8.6b) can be defined as [+VOL, –INST, +AFF], the category which was labelled Volitional Undergoer in chapter 5. The experiencer argument of (8.6a), on the other hand, must rather be described as [+VOL, +INST, +AFF] – an Affected Agent. Note that (8.6a) shows the same case-marking pattern as other verbs with Affected Agents would in Kannada: (8.7)

Kannada (Comrie 1985 :340): Nānu bisketannu tinde I.nom biscuit.acc ate ‘I ate a biscuit.’

What has traditionally been called experiencers, then, corresponds to at least two distinct participant types as defined in chapter 5 – Volitional Undergoers and Affected Agents. From this perspective, variation in the encoding of experiencer participants is only to be expected – if they do not form a coherent semantic class, there is no reason to expect them to take similar formal encoding. However, the sources of variation in experience clauses go beyond just the degree of control attributed to the experiencer participant.

8.3 Experience clauses and the transitive prototype (8.6a) and (8.7) represent the standard transitive clause in Kannada. Semantically, however, it is clear that experience clauses differ in fundamental ways from the transitive prototype. Bossong (1998) characterises this difference in terms of a “reversal of the semantic vector” – the experiencer is the target of the event and does not necessarily consciously initiate it. In terms of the current framework, the experiencer participant is, perhaps to varying extents, affected by the experience, whereas the degree to which it can be said to be in control of the event varies between different types of experience. At the same time, the second participant of an experience event, normally designated the stimulus or cause of the experience, is not in any significant way affected by it, nor usually consciously in control of it,

 Prototypical Transitivity

though in clauses like John frightened me a possible (though not a necessary) interpretation is that John actively did something with the express purpose of frightening me. Even without such an intentional interpretation, it is possible to view a stimulus argument as the cause or source of the experience event, since this event would not take place without the presence of the stimulus. Like experiencers, therefore, stimulus arguments may not constitute a homogeneous category in terms of the definitions proposed in chapter 5. Indeed, they are often difficult to categorise clearly; in 5.3.5 it was argued that they may frequently be characterisable as Neutrals, but ascribing some degree of causation or initiation of the experience event to the stimulus might suggest that it should be interpreted as a kind of Force, or even, in some cases, an Agent. In other words, a fundamental property of experience events is that they are difficult to classify in terms of the properties which define the transitive prototype. Not only do they deviate strongly from the transitive prototype in that they lack a maximal distinction between one clearly controlling and one clearly affected argument; but the precise nature of this deviation may itself be subject to variation, in that the two participants involved may be ascribed varying degrees of control over the event, and the experiencer may be conceived of as more or less affected. This difficulty in determining the distribution of control and affectedness across the participants of an experience clause is not merely a problem of linguistic analysis, in the sense that the specific inherent properties of such clauses simply cannot be captured by an analysis of two-participant events in terms of the distinctness of participants with respect to properties such as volitionality, instigation and affectedness. Quite to the contrary, this analysis would predict formal variation – crosslinguistically and language-internally – exactly in cases where it is difficult to assess the degree of control and affectedness exhibited by the participants in the event. That is, the difficulty of categorising experience events in terms of the degree of control and affectedness ascribed to their participants is a problem inherent to language and can be understood as the source of much of the crosslinguistic variation found in the encoding of experience clauses. In other words, the different formal encodings found in experience clauses can be seen as different strategies for handling this unclear distribution of control and affectedness over the arguments of the clause. As noted by Bossong, generalising the transitive pattern to cover such cases is one option, which is more likely to be employed if the experiencer participant is an Affected Agent rather than a Volitional Undergoer. Bossong’s notion of inversion, however, is somewhat unclear, in that it specifies a distinct structural frame for experiencer constructions (“un cadre valenciel à part”, Bossong 1998 :260). One might imagine, however, that the ultimate case of inversion would be one where the transitive frame is employed, but where the experiencer, as affected entity, is cast as the Patient and encoded as the



Chapter 8.  Experiencers and the dative 

transitive object. Bossong does not include in his discussion verbs of the type X frightens me, where the stimulus is construed as directly causing a change of state in the experiencer, and which, as Croft (1991) noted, are frequently encoded in just such constructions. Even verbs with a less obvious “causative” reading, however, are sometimes found with their experiencers encoded as transitive objects: (8.8) Yurakaré (unclassified, van Gijn 2006 :145, 164) a. Ti-bobo-m 1sg-hit-2sg ‘You hit me.’ b. Ti-jusu-ø 1sg-want-3 ‘I want it.’

There are also languages where the status of the experiencer as showing some degree both of control and affectedness is reflected directly in its structural encoding. For instance, in Siroi, the experiencer argument of the verb ‘like’ is in subject position, preceding the verb, but is cross-referenced with an object affix; in other words, experiencers share structural properties of both subjects and objects: (8.9)

Siroi (Trans-New Guinea, Madang; Wells 1979 :64): Sine nu nzali-sing-it 1pl 3sg like-1plO-3sg.pres ‘We like him.’

The “dative subject” construction found with experiencers in many languages may also to some extent be understood as representing such a mixture of subject and object properties; dative subjects often behave syntactically like subjects, but show nonsubject case-marking. The dative will be discussed in more detail in 8.4 below. The difference between the perception verbs ‘see’ and ‘look (at)’ has been variously described as involving a greater or lesser degree of agency, a greater or lesser degree of “effectiveness” (Tsunoda 1981) or a difference in verbal aspect, ‘see’ being characterised as a state and ‘look’ as an activity (Van Valin and Wilkins 1996). It was suggested above, however, that ‘see’ in general behaves more like an achievement than a state, which makes the latter analysis problematic. Agency alone does not either explain the difference between the two verbs; as Van Valin and Wilkins point out, if ‘look’ were simply an agentive version of ‘see’, then one might expect that

 Prototypical Transitivity

‘look’ used with an agency-cancelling adverbial should be semantically equivalent to ‘see’. That this it not in fact so is illustrated by the following pair of sentences: (8.10) a. Max accidentally looked at his neighbour’s test and was accused of cheating ≠ b. Max saw his neighbour’s test and was accused of cheating (van Valin and Wilkins 1996 :308).

The difference between these two verbs can, in fact, be more accurately understood in terms of the distinction between control and affectedness. In principle, an event of perception involves both: the experiencer must direct his attention or perceptual apparatus towards the stimulus, and is affected in the sense that he receives a visual impression of the stimulus. Now consider the sentence He looked at the sign, but he didn’t really see it – which would be a contradiction in terms if ‘look’ is to be analysed as having essentially the same meaning as ‘see’, with the added component of agency. What is being ascribed to the experiencer in the first part of the sentence is control: the directing of attention towards the sign. What is negated in the second part, on the other hand, is affectedness: the visual impression does not register properly with the experiencer, he does not ‘see’ it. In other words, ‘looking’ is a controlled activity, but does not strictly entail affectedness (though affectedness is normally implied, since registering a visual impression is the usual motivation for an act of looking), while ‘seeing’ strictly speaking necessarily involves only an effect, regardless of whether or not this effect is the result of a controlled engagement of visual attention. ‘Look at’, then, could be paraphrased as ‘direct one’s field of vision towards’, while ‘see’ means something like ‘receive a visual impression of ’. This difference in meaning is reflected in the relationship between the forms translated as ‘look’ and ‘see’ in Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese. In both of these languages, the construction meaning ‘see’ is a combination of ‘look’ and ‘perceive’ (Viberg 1984) – in other words, looking in itself does not necessarily entail perceiving, whereas seeing crucially involves registering a perception of the thing looked at: (8.11) Vietnamese (Austro-Asiatic, Mon-Khmer; Viberg 1984 :129): a. Nam (đã) xem chim Nam asp look bird ‘Nam looked at the birds.’ b. Nam (đã) xem th’ây chim Nam asp look perceive bird ‘Nam saw the birds.’



Chapter 8.  Experiencers and the dative 

(8.12) Mandarin (Sino-Tibetan, Chinese; Viberg 1984 :129–130): a. Wang kàn-le-kàn ni o Wang look-asp-look bird ‘Wang looked at the birds.’ b. Wang kàn jiàn-le ni o Wang look perceive-asp bird ‘Wang saw the birds.’

If the experiencer of ‘look’ is essentially controlling, while that of ‘see’ is essentially affected, we might expect this difference to be reflected in case-marking. Tsunoda (1981, 1985) predicts that crosslinguistically, the verb ‘see’ should always be formally encoded as more transitive than ‘look’, if there is a difference in formal transitivity between the two verbs. That is, ‘see’ and ‘look’ may both be equally transitive formally in a given language, but ‘look’ will never be more transitive than ‘see’. He ascribes this difference to the patient being “more attained” with ‘see’ than with ‘look’, meaning presumably that the “effect” of being perceived is achieved for the O argument of ‘see’ but not necessarily for that of ‘look at’ (Tsunoda 1985 :389). English is a simple example of a language in which this prediction is borne out; here ‘see’ occurs in a simple transitive construction with a direct object while ‘look’ takes a prepositional object. Another example is Finnish, where ‘see’ takes a nominative-accusative case-frame while ‘look’ takes nominative-partitive: (8.13) Finnish (Uralic, Finno-Ugric; Seppo Kittilä p.c.): a. Mies näk-i naise-n man.nom see-3sg.past woman-acc ‘A/the man saw a/the woman’ b Mies katso-i nais-ta man.nom look.at-3sg.past woman-part ‘A/the man looked at a/the woman.’

However, there are languages where exactly the opposite pattern is found. In the Polynesian language East Futuna, for example, ‘look’ takes a fully transitive, ergative-absolutive case-frame, while ‘see’ takes absolutive-oblique case-marking: (8.14) East Futuna (Austronesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian; Claire Moyse p.c.): a. Na tio a ia ki le ta’ine past see abs 3sg obl def girl ‘He saw the girl.’ b. Na tio-’i e ia le ta’ine past see-tr erg 3sg def girl ‘He looked at the girl.’

 Prototypical Transitivity

In Udi, the verb be?g/sun ‘see, observe’ (= look at) takes ergative-absolutive casemarking, while ak’sun ‘see, perceive’ takes the dative rather than the ergative case on the experiencer: (8.15) Udi (Nakh-Daghestanian, Daghestanian; Schulze 2001): a. Gädi-n-en sa adamar be?-ne-g/-i boy-sa-erg one man.abs see-3sg.ag-$-aor ‘The boy saw (observed) a man.’ b. Gädi-n-a sa adamar a-t’u-k-i boy-sa-dat1 one man.abs see-3sg.io-$-aor ‘The boy saw (perceived) a man.’

The Kartvelian language Svan shows another case-marking variant, where verbs of “controlled perception” such as xoγwnäri ‘listen’ take an ergative-dative caseframe, while those of “non-controlled perception” such as xesmi ‘hear’ take dativeabsolutive marking (Testelec 1998). The controlled-perception verbs do not take fully transitive, ergative-absolutive constructions; but the A argument is still encoded as controlling, taking the ergative case, while the reduced affectedness of the O argument is reflected by the use of the dative case. These differences can be explained in terms of the semantic analysis of core case-marking proposed in chapter 7. If the ergative case is basically a marker of controlling Agents, prototypically in a clause which also has a Patient, we might expect ergative case-marking to be able to extend to the experiencer participant of ‘look’, which is clearly controlling, but not to that of ‘see’, which is not; this is what we find in ergative languages like East Futuna, Udi, and Svan. The difference between the use of the accusative for the object of ‘see’ vs. the partitive for ‘look’ in Finnish is somewhat more subtle, as the stimulus is not strictly speaking affected in either case. However, the fact that ‘see’ is construed as having an effect – the stimulus is ‘impacted on’ in the sense that the experiencer visually registers it – may favour the use of the transitive construction in an accusative language even though the particulars of the event deviate considerably from the transitive prototype. It is certainly striking that the more controlled event tends to be encoded as more transitive in ergative languages, while the event with the more affected experiencer is typically encoded as more transitive in accusative languages. In these examples, the case-markers typically used for controlling Agents or affected Patients in transitive events are extended to participants in experience events which to varying degrees might be construed as controlling or affected. However, since neither of the participants in an experience clause actually is either a controlling Agent or an affected Patient, one might expect that a possible strategy for encoding them would be to omit overt marking altogether. That is, instead of



Chapter 8.  Experiencers and the dative 

using the transitive pattern to force an interpretation of the event as in some way similar to the transitive prototype, a language might refrain from encoding either participant as though it were an Agent or a Patient. As might be expected, this strategy is particularly common with verbs where no control-affectedness pattern is clearly implied, that is, the event cannot easily be construed as controlled, or as having a clearly perceptible effect. Thus in languages which show such encoding, it is typically applied to verbs describing emotional states such as ‘like’ or ‘love’. This marking pattern is variously known as “bidirectional marking” (Croft 1993), “double-nominative” or “double-absolutive” marking. It is characterised by the use of the unmarked core case on both arguments of a bivalent clause. The fact that it is the unmarked case which is used is unsurprising on the understanding that such marking constitutes a lack of specification of either agentivity/control or affectedness; no argument is marked overtly as being either actively controlling (ergative case in ergative languages) or affected (accusative case in accusative languages). Thus the accusative languages Korean and Japanese both show a “double-nominative” pattern with the verb ‘like’; neither of the arguments of this verb is construed as being affected, and so neither argument qualifies for accusative marking: (8.16)

Korean (Isolate; Shibatani 1982 :106): Nae-ka ai-ka kwiyetta I-nom child-nom like ‘I like the child.’

(8.17)

Japanese (Isolate; Shibatani 1982 :105): Taroo ga Hanako ga sukida Taroo nom Hanako nom like ‘Taroo likes Hanako.’

Similarly, Belhare, an ergative Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal, does not construe either argument of ‘like’ as an agentive participant eligible for ergative case, and so employs a “double-absolutive” clause: (8.18)

Belhare (Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman; Bickel 2004 :98): ŋka iŋa lim-yu 1sg.abs beer.abs be.delicious-npt ‘I like the beer.’

The ergative language Nias (Austronesian, Indonesia) has the additional peculiarity of having an absolutive case which is marked relative to the ergative. Brown (2001) labels the case form in question “mutated”; the unmutated form of a noun is its citation form, and the mutated form is derived from it by regular morphophonemic rules. The mutated form is used for S and O arguments, thus answering

 Prototypical Transitivity

to the usual definition of an absolutive case. Marked absolutive case-marking is extremely rare; Dixon (1994) notes that it “appears not to occur”. Even such a marked-absolutive system, however, allows double-absolutive case-marking on ‘like’ and a few other verbs of experience. Thus it is not simply the case that “bidirectional” marking consists of applying the formally unmarked case to both arguments; rather, what happens is that neither argument is seen as qualifying for ergative/accusative marking because neither argument is construed as agentive or patientive. Thus Nias employs a regular transitive construction for ‘see’, where the experiencer is presumably construed as at least potentially controlling, but a double-absolutive construction for ‘like’, where it is not: (8.19) Nias (Austronesian, Western Malayo-Polynesian; Brown 2001, p.c.): a. U-zira ya ba fasa 1sg.real-see 3sg.abs loc market.abs ‘I saw her at the market.’ b. Omasi ndrao naßö-u like 1sg.abs companion.abs-2sg.poss ‘I like your companion.’

The fluid-S language Eastern Pomo also allows identical marking of both arguments of some verbs of experience, including ‘love’. The marker employed is that corresponding to the patient of transitive verbs: (8.20)

Eastern Pomo (Hokan, Pomoan; McLendon 1978 :3): Mí:ral wí ma:ra 3sg.pat 1sg.pat love ‘I love her.’

McLendon (1978 :4) describes the “patient” marker as occurring where there is a “lack of protagonist control”; thus this marking pattern again reflects the fact that neither argument is cast as controlling the event. To summarise, the understanding of prototypical transitivity as involving a maximal distinction between one controlling and one affected participant provides a perspective on the variation found in clauses of experience both within and across languages. The very fact that the participants in such clauses are difficult to classify in terms of properties such as control and affectedness make them highly eligible for such variation; and the types of formal encoding chosen often reflect the degree to which the participants of a particular experience event can be interpreted as in control of, or affected by, this event.



Chapter 8.  Experiencers and the dative 

8.4 The dative case 8.4.1 Dative as a marker of Volitional Undergoers As may be seen from the examples presented in the previous section, a common strategy for the encoding of experiencer arguments is the use of a case-marker distinct from those typically found in fully transitive clauses, commonly labelled the dative. The use of the dative in experience clauses might be seen simply as a formal indication of the reduced transitivity of such clauses with respect to the transitive prototype – a formally intransitive construction is chosen to encode what semantically deviates from a typical transitive event. Indeed, the requirement that a fully transitive clause have two distinct and prominent participants clearly is not fulfilled by experience events, where the experiencer participant is typically construed as much more prominent than the stimulus triggering the experience (cf. Bickel 2004 :77). However, the function of the dative case goes beyond the mere indication of reduced formal transitivity. The dative case shows a diverse range of functions within and across languages, and indeed providing a crosslinguistically adequate definition of the category ‘dative’ is far from unproblematic. Case categories such as ergative and accusative can be defined by distributional criteria: the ergative as the case of A as opposed to S and O in formally transitive clauses, the accusative as the case of O as opposed to S and A. The term “dative”, on the other hand, is used in some languages for a category which appears to be mainly semantic in nature, in others for a category which does to a certain extent have a structural specification, but which generally extends to uses which can only be specified in semantic terms. Thus, in Classical Greek and Latin, where the term has its origin, the dative was used for the structural category of indirect objects; but it also marked the nonsubject complements of verbs such as ‘help’, ‘obey’, and ‘trust’, as well as having a number of other uses (see e.g. Blake 2001). However, the precise range of the case category labelled “dative” differs greatly between languages. Blake (2001 :143) suggests that in languages where the recipient argument of the verb ‘give’ takes one case-marker and complements of the type of intransitive verbs mentioned for Greek and Latin take another, it is the latter which should be labelled dative, while the recipient case might for instance be termed allative. Under this interpretation, says Blake, “the dative emerges as the main noncore case used to mark complements”. Other writers in practice appear to equate the dative with the case of the recipient argument of ditransitives (e.g. Blansitt 1988, Van Belle and Van Langendonck 1996).

 Prototypical Transitivity

A number of attempts have been made at giving a semantic characterisation of the dative. Blake (2001) proposes that the dative is used to encode entities that are the target of an activity or emotion. Fillmore (1968) defined the dative as “the case of the animate being affected by the state or action identified by the verb”; Foley (1986) similarly speaks of the dative as denoting the “typically animate, intended goal of an action”. Van Langendonck and Van Belle (1998a) suggest that the dative refers to “an interested party which is affected by the process without being actively involved in it”. As noted in chapter 7, case categories typically center on salient participant relations such as Agent (ergative) and Patient (accusative). These two relations are central because they represent the maximally semantically distinct participant categories: a nonaffected controller on the one hand, a noncontrolling affected entity on the other. One might argue that these are the two main ways in which participants may interact with the world: either consciously doing something, typically with the purpose of achieving some effect, or having something happen to one. There is, however, a third salient way in which specifically human participants may be involved in an event, namely through being the target of some effect which crucially presupposes sentience. Such a role is conceptually clearly distinct from that of Agent as it does not involve the controlled instigation of the event in question. At the same time, it carries an implication of actively receiving rather than passively undergoing the effect in question, and so is also fundamentally distinct from a Patient. Palmer (1994 :31) calls this role “Beneficiary” and considers it “the third-most important role to be identified typologically”. Newman (1998 :11) argues that ‘giving’ should be considered “a basic type of act of considerable functional importance”, and that consequently the role of Recipient can be seen as a basic role in addition to Agent and Patient. There is much to suggest then, that a beneficiary/recipient-type role must be recognised as prominent in human language; it is this role that we have labelled Volitional Undergoer. If a language is to make a case distinction beyond that differentiating between Agent and Patient, then, it would be natural for this third case category to center on the participant type defined as [+VOL, –INST, +AFF]. The dative is generally the third relational case distinguished in a case system (Blake 2001 :157), and it is well known that its most typical uses is for recipients, benefactives, and experiencers (see also Næss to appear). In the following we will see that most of the additional functions commonly found with the dative crosslinguistically can be understood as relating to its core function of marking participants which are [+VOL, –INST, +AFF]. 1. The third case category on Blake’s hierarchy is the genitive, which will be disregarded here as it is primarily an adnominal case.



Chapter 8.  Experiencers and the dative 

8.4.2 From recipients to possessors As was noted in 5.3.1, the frequent use of the same formal marker – the dative case – to mark recipients, benefactives, and experiencers, can be explained by the fact that these participants all share the same feature specifications in terms of volitionality, instigation, and affectedness (though see the above discussion on the heterogeneity of the category ‘experiencer’): [+VOL, –INST, +AFF]. The fairly frequent use of the dative to mark possessors may be seen as an extension of the recipient/benefactive function. Possessors are attributed the property of having something, the result state of receiving or benefitting from something. That is, someone who receives something or benefits from an act undergoes a change of state and so is affected; a possessor is essentially someone who has undergone such a change of state, and may therefore take similar encoding as recipients and benefactives. Thus a variety of languages employ the dative to mark the possessor in at least some possessive constructions: (8.21)

Marathi (Indo-European, Indic; Pandharipande 1997 :230): malā tīn bhāū āhet I.dat three brothers are ‘I have three brothers.’

(8.22)

Lezgian (Nakh-Daghestanian, Daghestanian; Haspelmath 1993a:89): Ada-z xtul-ar awa she-dat grandchild-pl be.in ‘She has grandchildren.’

(8.23

Kannada (Dravidian, Southern; Sridhar 1990 :133): Nanage eraDu taNNive I-dat two eye-3-pl-n ‘I have two eyes.’

There are also languages in which the syncretism between the dative case and possessive marking is manifested, as it were, in the opposite direction: rather than the dative extending to cover possessives, the genitive case extends to some experiencers. This is the case in Bengali (Klaiman 1981b; Mohanan 1994): (8.24)

Bengali (Indo-European, Indic; Klaiman 1981b:123): Toomake aamaar khub pachondo hay you-obj my-gen very liking becomes ‘I like you lots.’

 Prototypical Transitivity

8.4.3 Causee case-marking The dative case is used as the marker of the causee in causative constructions in a number of languages. In a language like Turkish, where causativisation is an extremely productive and regularised process, the causee of causativised transitives is treated formally like the indirect object of any ditransitive verb, and so takes the dative case: (8.25) Turkish (Altaic, Turkic; Comrie 1989 :176): a. Müdür mektub-u imzala-dı director letter-acc sign-past ‘The director signed the letter.’ b. Dişçi mektub-u müdür-e imzala-t-tı dentist letter-acc director-dat sign-caus-past ‘The dentist got the director to sign the letter.’

However, there are other languages where the dative alternates with another case as the marker of causee arguments. In Japanese, causatives of intransitives may take either accusative or dative marking on the causee: (8.26) Japanese (Isolate; Comrie 1985 :334): a. Taroo ga Ziroo o ik-ase-ta Taroo nom Ziroo acc go-caus-past b. Taroo ga Ziroo ni ik-ase-ta Taroo nom Ziroo dat go-caus-past ‘Taroo made Ziroo go.’

In these examples, the accusative implies a high degree of coercion, as in Taroo forcing Ziroo to go, perhaps against his will. The dative, on the other hand, implies a lesser degree of causation and suggests that the causee has some choice in the matter. The Tungusic language Even (Malchukov 1993) has a similar alternation where the causee of a causativised transitive may take either dative or accusative case; with dative case, the clause can be interpreted as meaning either ‘let x do sth’ or ‘make x do sth’, whereas the accusative only yields the ‘make x do sth’ reading, that is, the higher degree of coercion. This type of alternation receives a natural explanation under the analysis of the dative as marking [+VOL, –INST, +AFF] participants. While the actual instigation of the action in question is attributed to the causer, the volitional participation of the causee is relevant in (8.26b) in a way that it is not in (8.26a), where the causee is marked as a regular Patient ([–VOL, –INST, +AFF]). The alternation is between a causee which has no influence over his participation in the action ([–VOL], leading to accusative case-marking), and one which does have such influence over his



Chapter 8.  Experiencers and the dative 

own participation, even though the event is instigated by another participant – such a causee is [+VOL, –INST], and so quite naturally takes the dative case. Interestingly, however, we find causative constructions in e.g. Kannada where the dative alternates with the instrumental as the causee case-marker, and where it is the instrumental rather than the dative that implies the lesser degree of coercion: (8.27) a.

Kannada (Dravidian, Southern; Comrie 1985 :340):

Nānu bisketannu tinde I.nom biscuit.acc ate ‘I ate a biscuit.’

b. Avanu nanage bisketannu tinnisidanu he.nom me.dat biscuit.acc ate.caus ‘He fed me a biscuit.’ c. Avanu nanninda bisketannu tinnisidanu he.nom me.inst biscuit.acc ate.caus ‘He made me eat a biscuit.’

Here (8.27b), with the dative object, implies actual, physical feeding, while (c), with the instrumental, suggests rather that the causee was persuaded to eat. On the face of it, this example seems to show more or less the opposite effect to that illustrated above for Japanese and Even, and would appear to directly contradict the analysis of dative-marked causees as being “less coerced” and more in control of their own involvement in the event. It is significant, however, that not all causativised verbs in Kannada show this alternation. In fact, dative marking on causees of causativised transitives is restricted to a specific semantic class of verbs, namely ingestive verbs (Sridhar 1990 :87). All other causativised transitives allow only instrumental case on their causee argument. A similar pattern was illustrated in 4.3.4 for Hindi, and is repeated below: (8.28) Hindi (Indo-European, Indic; Saksena 1982 :41–42): a. Ram-nee khaanaa khaa-yaa Ram-erg food eat-past ‘Ram ate dinner.’ b. Mai-nee raam-koo/*see khaanaa khil-aa-yaa I-erg Ram-dat/acc (*ins) food eat-caus-past ‘I fed Ram.’ c. Raam-nee pee kaa -aa Ram-erg tree cut-past ‘Ram cut the tree.’

 Prototypical Transitivity

d. Mai-nee raam-see/*koo pee kaa -aa-yaa I-erg Ram-ins (*dat/acc) tree cut-caus-past ‘I made Ram cut the tree.’

Parallel data for Malayalam can be found in Mohanan (1983). As was discussed in chapter 4, the so-called ingestive verbs are characterised by taking an Affected Agent argument, defined in terms of semantic feature values as [+VOL, +INST, +AFF]. Under causativisation with the ‘feed’ reading, the [+INST] element is effectively removed: the act of eating is in principle the same, but it is no longer instigated by the person eating, but rather by the causer. Note that this is the reading where the causer is taken to physically feed the causee, which means that the action is physically instigated by the causer rather than the causee. The causee argument of causativised ingestive verbs is therefore characterised as [+VOL, –INST, +AFF] – the core meaning of the dative case. On the other hand, under the ‘make x eat’ reading, the actual instigation of the act of eating is still done by the person eating – he is still doing the actual taking of food and inserting it into his mouth, although he is being made to do so by some means or other by the causee. In this case the causee is encoded in the same way as causees of other transitive verbs, namely as participants which instigate events through being manipulated by an agent – [–VOL, +INST, +AFF] participants, that is, Instruments. That instrumental case-marking should be employed on arguments which semantically speaking are Instruments should not require further justification. Of course, the precise range of use of a case-marker depends on the overall system which it is a part of (cf. 7.6). Japanese and Even use the dative case for “less coercive” causatives, whereas Kannada employs the instrumental in essentially the same function, albeit with a restricted set of verbs. This can probably be explained in terms of different possible perspectives on the role of causee: it can be viewed either as an entity being manipulated by an agent for the instigation of some event, an Instrument, or as an entity whose volition is still crucially engaged in the event in question even though it is being subjected to some degree of manipulation from an Agent. It is probably not possible to predict which of these possibilities will be realised in any given language. However, given that both types of patterns occur, we can explain the different types of case alternations found in Japanese and Even on the one hand, and Kannada on the other, in terms of the semantic differences between being forced to perform an act and having some degree of volitional influence on the matter, and between affected-agent verbs vs. verbs taking regular Agent arguments.



Chapter 8.  Experiencers and the dative 

8.4.4 The relevance of animacy The dative is in many languages associated in various ways with animate participants. This is not surprising, given that the category was defined above as involving an effect which presupposes sentience on the part of the affected participant; animacy is a prerequisite for sentience. Thus it has been argued, for instance, that the dative in Icelandic signals the humanness of the dative-marked referent in examples such as (8.29a, c): (8.29) Icelandic (Barðdal 2001 :46): a. þurrka barninu dry child-the.dat ‘dry (off) the child’ b. þurrka handklæðið dry towel-the.acc ‘dry the towel’ c. greiða barninu comb child-the.dat ‘comb the child(‘s hair)’ d. greiða hárið comb hair-the.acc ‘comb the hair’

However, this analysis does not account for examples such as (5.2), where the dative signalled the volitional participation of the affected entity as opposed to its being involuntarily exposed to the effects of the act; the object participant in these examples is human in both instances. Compare also (8.30): (8.30) Icelandic (Barðdal 2001 :150): a. Hann fór út að ganga með hundinn he.nom went out to walk with dog-the.acc ‘He walked the dog.’ b. Hann fór út að ganga með konunni he.nom went out to walk with woman-the.dat ‘He took a walk with the woman.’

Of these examples, Barðdal (2001 :150) writes that “when the object of the preposition með ‘with’ is not capable of independent volitional action, it is case-marked with the accusative case, while when it is at an equal level with the subject, it is case-marked with the dative case”. In other words, it is the volitional involvement rather than the humanness as such of the participant in (8.30b) that is at issue; ‘the

 Prototypical Transitivity

woman’ differs from ‘the dog’ is having a say in whether or not she will participate in the action. The notion of a sentient affected entity is probably also at issue in examples like (8.31): (8.31) Icelandic (Barðdal 2003 :149): a. Mér gekk vel b. I.dat went well ‘It went well for me.’

þetta gekk vel this.nom went well ‘This went well.’

Here, the a. sentence denotes a beneficial effect on the sentient participant, while the b. example describes an outcome which cannot be said to affect the subject participant. Similar alternations are found in other languages, with the dative specifically encoding the affectedness of a sentient entity. In Choctaw (Muskogean, USA), for example, the use of the dative prefix on a number of adjectives changes the meaning from, roughly, “be characterised by x” to “be affected by x”; so siokpólo ‘I am no good’ with the 1sg dative prefix am- becomes amokpólo ‘things are going badly for me’; kapassa ‘cold’ with a dative prefix becomes ankapassa ‘I am cold’, and so on (Nicklas 1974). As will be clear from the Icelandic examples, it is not always easy to make a distinction between the dative marking entities which are affected by virtue of being sentient (the dative prototype) and marking any kind of human, affected entity. In many languages, the dative is extended to cover animate objects of transitive clauses in general, so-called dative-accusative syncretism: (8.32) Catalan (Indo-European, Romance; Hualde 1992 :240): a. inanimate DO: El nen va rebre una carta the boy paux.3sg receive.inf a letter ‘The boy received a letter.’ b. animate DO:

Veuré a la Maria see.fut.1s dat art M. ‘I will see Mary.’

c. IO:

En Joan li va donar una rosa a la Maria art J. 3sg.dat paux.3sg give a rose dat art M. ‘John gave a rose to Mary.’

(8.33) Yessan-Mayo (Sepik, Tama-Sepik; Foley 1986 :101) a. inanimate DO: An toma mati-ye I talk hear-nrpast ‘I heard the talk.’



Chapter 8.  Experiencers and the dative 

b. animate DO:

An ti-ni aki-ye I she-dat fear-nrpast ‘I was afraid of her.’

c. IO:

An ri-ni awes nuwa-ti I he-dat food give-fut ‘I will give him food.’

According to Bossong (1991), dative markers are the most important diachronic source of newly developed accusative markers, which often, at least in an initial stage of their development, show this type of differential patterning. The use of the dative for animacy-based differential object marking is a natural consequence of the association of the dative with animate, affected entities. However, as was pointed out in chapter 7, differential object marking on the basis of definiteness also occurs, and such markers may also arise from datives, although this may be less common than for animacy-governed DOM markers. Bossong (1991) and Lehmann (1995) suggest that in general, the link between the dative and DOM can be explained in terms of the high degree of independence of animate/definite objects; cf. the discussion in 3.2.2. 8.4.5 Less affected objects Rather than mark animate as opposed to inanimate objects, in some languages the dative is used for objects which are low in affectedness: (8.34) Djapu (Australian, Pama-Nyungan; Morphy 1983 :38): a. Bala bu-ma-n ŋanya then hit-unm-im 3sg.acc ‘Then (he) hits him.’ b. Bala bu-ma-n nhanŋu then hit-unm-im 3sg.dat ‘Then (he) hits at him [but doesn’t touch him].’

Similarly, in Warlpiri (Hale 1973, Andrews 1985), the dative case is used for the objects of verbs such as ‘look for’ and ‘dig for’ as well as for verbs of “unsuccessful action” – that is, where no effect is achieved on the object. In Chechen (NakhDaghestanian, Nichols 1981), verbal lexemes which denote events with a drastic effect on their objects take absolutive objects, while lexemes denoting events which affect their objects to a lesser extent take dative objects. Thus den ‘kill’ takes ergative-absolutive case-marking, while túoxan ‘hit’ takes ergative-dative. The traditional notion of indirect object covers not only recipients of ditransitives, but also

 Prototypical Transitivity

the complements of various verbs which are said to describe an “indirect effect”, such as those cited in the discussion in 8.4.1. The use of the dative for indirect or unachieved effects may in fact also be linked to the property of volitionality or sentience. Firstly, a much greater range of effects can be ascribed to sentient than to non-sentient beings; notions such as receiving, benefitting, experiencing etc. do not have a direct physical impact on the entity in question, but are nevertheless significant effects of the event from the point of view of this entity. By contrast, inanimate or non-sentient entities do not generally register any effects beyond direct physical impact. In other words, the notion of indirect effects is intimately associated with sentience. Secondly, the volitional involvement of an affected entity often implies that the effect in question is less drastic or less severe than when the affected entity is a proper Patient, that is, without any influence over its own affectedness. It was noted in 5.3.1 that volitional undergoers are often interpreted as beneficiaries, simply because for someone to volitionally submit to being affected by some event, one would generally expect the effect in question to be beneficial. More severe effects involving physical change or destruction do not generally take place with the volitional involvement of the affected entity. The use of the dative to mark less-affected or unaffected objects, even when these objects are not necessarily animate, can therefore be seen as an extension of the basic function of marking volitional undergoers: from effects which are assumed to be less severe because undergone voluntarily, to less severe or unachieved effects in general. 8.4.6 Uncontrolled intransitives In some languages, the dative case appears on the subjects of certain intransitive verbs. Foley (1986) notes that in Waris of Papua New Guinea, the dative case extends to the S argument of verbs expressing uncontrolled changes of states: (8.35) Waris (Border; Foley 1986 :109–110): a. He-m daha-v he-dat die-pres ‘He is dying.’ b. Ka-m takola-na I-dat slip.and.fall-past ‘I slipped and fell.’



Chapter 8.  Experiencers and the dative 

A similar situation obtains in Sinhala, where the dative case is used for the subject of various verbs denoting involuntary or noncontrolled actions, including those derived with the “involitive” affix: (8.36) Sinhala (Indo-European, Indic; Gair 1990 :13): a. Miniha duwәnәwa man.nom run.pres ‘The man runs.’ b. Minihatә diwenәwa man.dat run.invol.pres ‘The man runs (involuntarily).’

Note also the use of the dative on the involuntary agent in the German example (3.3). Another use of the dative which relates to lack of control is with constructions of obligation, where the participant which is under obligation to perform a certain act is marked with the dative case. Such a use of the dative is found for instance in Latin, where the construction traditionally labelled dativus auctoris implied that the dative-marked participant was under some obligation: (8.37)

Latin (Van Hoecke 1996 :15): Faciendum est mihi illud... quod illaec postulat do.nom.ger be.3sg me.dat that which she.nom ask ‘I must do what she asks.’

In modern-day languages this type of construction is found for instance in HindiUrdu: (8.38) Urdu (Indo-European, Indic; Butt and King 1991 :34): a. Anjum-ne xat likh-naa hai Anjum-erg letter-nom write-inf is ‘Anjum wants to write a letter.’ b. Anjum-ko xat likh-naa hai Anjum-dat letter-nom write-inf is ‘Anjum has to write a letter.’

These uses of the dative can also be related to its function as marking [+VOL, –INST, +AFF] participants; that is, participants which are affected by an event which they do not themselves instigate. The dative-marked participants in (8.35– 38) all have something inflicted upon them which they are not directly in control over; but they differ from patients in that the effect they are subjected to crucially presupposes some degree of sentient involvement. All examples of dative subjects in Waris given by Foley (1986) refer to animate entities, and indeed to events which

 Prototypical Transitivity

only befall animate entities; the marking of a participant as involuntarily involved in Sinhala presupposes that the participant’s involvement could have been voluntary; and only sentient beings can be subjected to some form of obligation. Most of the commonly recognised uses of the dative, then, can be accounted for on the assumption that the core meaning of the dative is to mark Volitional Undergoers – participants with the semantic feature specification [+VOL, –INST, +AFF]. There are certainly other common functions of the dative which do not directly involve the affectedness of a sentient entity, such as spatial goals, locations, and points in time. Nevertheless at least some of these can be related to the uses discussed above; for instance, a spatial goal shares with a recipient the property of being the endpoint of an act of transfer.

chapter 9

Beyond prototypical transitivity

9.1 From Agent and Patient to subject and object This book has discussed the concept of a transitive prototype, what it implies and how it should be defined, and the consequences of this definition for the analysis of certain structural phenomena, particularly case-marking. Prototypical transitivity is primarily a semantic concept, but one with obvious structural implications. Indeed, the justification for positing a transitive prototype at all is as a semantic correlate to an observed structural pattern, and so the way in which the prototype is formulated may have consequences for the way in which we approach a variety of questions of language structure. An aspect of clause structure clearly intimately connected with the notion of transitivity is that of the traditional grammatical relations subject and object. These have been the subject of considerable discussion in linguistics for quite a while, particularly the subject relation, which is generally understood as a generalisation over certain semantic and pragmatic properties of particular participant types. A simplistic statement of the relationship between the notion of prototypical transitivity and its component concepts Agent and Patient, on the one hand, and subjects and objects, on the other, is to say that the subject and object relations are generalisations from the core notions of Agent and Patient: when the structural position taken up by the Agent in a prototypical transitive clause is expanded to include participants of other semantic types, the result is a category with a structural rather than a semantic definition – which we might label ‘subject’. There are of course many additional problems in coming up with a workable definition of “subject” and “object” with this basic understanding as a startingpoint, only one of which is the question of how the arguments of a transitive clause relate to the single argument of an intransitive – whether S is treated formally like A or like O, and what the implications are in the latter case for the labelling of the transitive arguments as subject or object. In addition, discourse-pragmatic concerns clearly play a role – the category “subject”, in particular, is typically understood to involve notions such as topicality or pragmatic prominence. It is not unusual for grammatical relations to be defined in terms of a conjunction of semantic

 Prototypical Transitivity

and pragmatic properties, so that a subject, for example, is defined as an agent which is also a topic (see e.g. Comrie 1989 :120). The border between semantics and pragmatics is notoriously blurry, and this is particularly true in questions of transitivity and clause structure. The traditional notion of transitivity is semantic in nature in that it refers to a certain type of relationship between the participants in a clause – a relationship characterisable in terms of semantic concepts such as agency, control, and affectedness. At the same time, the notion of distinctness of participants, proposed here as the basic principle underlying the transitive prototype, clearly has pragmatic as well as semantic aspects. Indeed, the definition of prototypical transitivity argued for in this book integrates semantic and pragmatic aspects in that it makes explicit reference to the notion of pragmatic prominence: a transitive clause was defined as one which construes a situation as involving two distinct, prominent participants. We saw in 2.3.3 and 3.2.2 that this understanding of what exactly “transitivity” implies has significant consequences for the definition of the syntactic concept of object. Defined as a grammatical relation, an object should be an entity with relatively high pragmatic prominence, one which requires a certain amount of individual attention. Patient-like participants of low pragmatic prominence, on the other hand, are much less likely to receive the syntactic prominence associated with encoding as a distinct syntactic argument, a grammatical object. That this distinction is crucial for our understanding of what it means to be an object is shown clearly by the repeated claims that it is most natural, unmarked or prototypical for an object to be low in prominence or individuation. There are two independent sources of terminological confusion at play here: Firstly, the difference between “object” as a syntactic concept vs. “object” in the sense of “O participant of a two-participant verb”, regardless of how this participant is encoded syntactically. In the latter sense, “object” may refer to a participant of low pragmatic prominence; in the former, however, it necessarily refers to a relatively highly prominent participant, because only such participants tend to get encoded as independent syntactic arguments. Secondly, the difference between “prototypical” and “unmarked”, which was discussed in chapter 2. “Prototypical” essentially means “fulfilling a set of criteria which are taken as characteristic of a certain category” and so is not the same as “unmarked”, because the category defined by the prototype in question may itself be marked with respect to some other category. If the criterion for markedness is taken to be degree of individuation or pragmatic prominence, with high prominence being more marked, then such a thing as an “unmarked object” could be argued not to exist, since syntactic objecthood by definition entails a high degree of prominence. On the other hand, an “unmarked O participant”, as pointed out in 2.3.4 and 3.3, by these criteria is another thing altogether. Crucially, it is different



Chapter 9.  Beyond prototypical transitivity 

from a prototypical object, which could be defined as an O participant fulfilling the criteria for Patienthood (including a high degree of individuation). The upshot of this discussion is that a clear understanding of the semantic and pragmatic correlates of the notion of transitivity is absolutely essential in attempting to address questions concerning the crosslinguistic properties of grammatical relations. To the extent that our theoretical approach to transitivity shapes our understanding of what exactly constitutes a transitive clause (which was seen to be the case in 2.3), it clearly also shapes our understanding of the nature of grammatical relations.

9.2 Structural vs. semantic case Closely linked to the question of syntactic vs. semantic relations is that of so-called structural vs. semantic case. Cases are often assumed to fall into two distinct categories: structural cases, which are assigned to NPs on the basis of their structural position, and semantic or inherent cases, which reflect semantic properties and are assigned by specific verb lexemes. In generative theory, the distinction is related to that between D-structure and S-structure, where inherent (semantic) case is assigned at D-structure while structural case is assigned according to the position of an NP in S-structure (Chomsky 1986, 1995); but the distinction is common even in monostratal theories of syntax and case-marking (see e.g. Wunderlich and Lakämper 2001). The approach to case presented in this book has been fundamentally semantic in nature, with the additional claim that the so-called core cases (those typically used on arguments of transitive clauses) have a discriminatory function in addition to their purely semantic content. This approach does not exclude the possibility that case may be structural, in the sense that a case with a particular semantic specification may be generalised to the point where its distribution may be given a syntactic description. It does, however, reject the thought that some cases are “structural” in the sense that they are devoid of semantic content. Indeed, it is much less problematic to generalise from a semantic to a structural function than the other way round. A theory which claims, for instance, that the ergative case is purely structurally assigned will struggle to explain why it is so frequently associated with semantic notions like agency or control. By contrast, assuming cases to have a basic semantic content provides a theoretical startingpoint for understanding how the structurally specifiable uses of case arises, and indeed why some case categories are more likely than others to develop uses which may be characterised as structural.

 Prototypical Transitivity

Chapter 7 discussed the ways in which cases may be extended beyond their core semantic specification to cover additional participant types which to some extent are perceived as semantically similar to this specification. It is a reasonable assumption that some combinations of semantic properties lend themselves more easily to such generalisation than others. Specifically, the cases which reflect the prototypical distribution of control and affectedness across arguments – control but no affectedness for the ergative, affectedness but no control for the accusative – should be expected to generalise more readily than cases which represent various types of part-controlling, part-affected relationships. When a case category is positively specified for only one of these two properties, instances which do not fit the specification exactly are more easily assessed as similar to this semantic specification than a category which in its core function requires a mixture of control and affectedness properties. For example, a clause where the instigation of the act is not actually volitional on the part of the instigator, or where the instigator perhaps does not even have any volition to begin with, may still be subsumed under the “controlling” case category, because to the extent that there is any control in the clause, it still resides with the instigating entity. Such a nonvolitional instigating entity might therefore still receive ergative case in an ergative system, even though it does not strictly match the core instance. Similarly, an entity which is only partially affected or only indirectly affected might still take the accusative case in an accusative system, since it is still the locus of what affectedness there is in the clause – to the extent that any argument shows any affectedness, it is the partially/indirectly affected object. On the other hand, case categories whose semantic specification contains a mixture of control and affectedness properties generalise much less easily to anything resembling a structural function. The dative, defined as [+VOL, –INST, +AFF], is generally considered to be a structural case because it typically marks the category of indirect object of ditransitives, in languages where such a category exists; but it also shows a number of uses, crosslinguistically, which can only be explained with reference to a semantic relation between an NP and a predicate. Thus the dative shows some properties both of structural and of semantic cases. The reason for this is that the semantic function encoded by the dative – [+VOL, –INST, +AFF] – is much less readily generalised across a wide range of argument types. Most two-participant situations have one participant which might be construed as controlling and one which might be construed as affected, and so the ergative and accusative cases apply to a broad range of semantically diverse clauses. The dative, on the other hand, encodes a specific combination of control and affectedness properties, namely that of being volitionally affected, or affected by virtue of being sentient. Participants corresponding to this specification are only present in certain types of clauses. Some of these, namely those containing ditransi-



Chapter 9.  Beyond prototypical transitivity 

tive verbs, can be given a structural specification, which gives rise to the concept of indirect object. Others, however, cannot, and so a number of uses of the dative can only be described in semantic terms. As a result, the dative is perceived as having some uses which are purely structural and others which are clearly semantic. The possibility for generalisation is even lower for the instrumental, which is pretty uniformly labelled as a semantic case in linguistic work. Assuming that the core function of the instrumental case is to code semantic Instruments, its configuration of control and affectedness properties – [–VOL, +INST, +AFF] – is such that it only applies to participants which are instigating by virtue of being manipulated by another participant. This specification does not extend to very many nonprototypical cases, and so does not give rise to any generalised category which can be specified in structural terms. Case categories whose semantic specification contains a mixture of control and affectedness properties extend less easily to nonprototypical instances for a very simple reason: any deviations from the semantics of “mixed” cases are more likely to fall under one of the semantically unmarked cases, that is, those which encode either only control or only affectedness. Thus the dative, for instance, does not generally extend to cover nonvolitional instances, because such instances are already covered by the accusative. A language may have only one term covering both volitional and nonvolitional affected arguments; but if there is both a dative and an accusative case-marker, then deviations from the semantic specification of the dative are likely to fall under the accusative. Similarly, the instrumental does not extend easily to nonaffected arguments because arguments which are instigating but not affected are more likely to fall under the ergative or nominative, the cases of controlling or instigating arguments. In short, the distinction between structural and semantic case is more of a cline than a dichotomy. All cases may be understood as having a core semantic specification; but some are semantically general enough that they are able to fill a range of functions which can be characterised in structural terms. While this basic understanding of how case works certainly does not solve all problems of analysis, it does allow for a more flexible and, in many cases, more coherent approach than assuming a qualitative difference between some cases which are entirely “structural” and others which are entirely “semantic”.

9.3 Other prototypes A central point of the discussion of the transitive prototype in chapter 2 was the notion of the distinctness of categories: a prototype category is defined in maximal contrast to other categories in the same domain. This clearly implies that there

 Prototypical Transitivity

are other prototypes to be recognised within the domain of verb-argument relations; at the very least an intransitive prototype, with which the transitive prototype was contrasted in chapters 2 and 3; presumably also a ditransitive prototype. The nature of these prototype concepts and their relationship to the transitive prototype is worth a moment’s consideration, although a full exploration of them would probably require a book of its own. We may ask, however, to what extent the semantic properties identified here as relevant to the transitive prototype – volitionality, instigation, and affectedness – are equally relevant for the definition of an intransitive or a ditransitive prototype? The single argument of an intransitive clause is by its nature semantically diverse. It is unlikely that a specific configuration of the properties of volitionality, instigation and affectedness is directly relevant for the definition of an intransitive prototype as such, simply because the the underlying principle which led us to evoking them for the transitive prototype was that of distinctness of participants. The central characteristic of an intransitive clause is that there is no distinction to be made – only a “single, indivisible participant”, in the words of Kemmer (1993), is involved. From this point of view, the notion of an intransitive prototype may not actually have much semantic content beyond the simple specification of a single participant. On the other hand, semantic properties of essentially the same kind as those discussed here in relation to the transitive prototype, are relevant in languages which make formal distinctions within the class of intransitive subjects. The splitS and fluid-S systems discussed in chapter 7 are a case in point, where S participants are categorised as more or less controlling and/or more or less affected, and their formal encoding differs accordingly. Even finer distinctions are made in a language like Sinhala, which is not generally considered a split-S language in the usual sense of the term, but which allows both accusative- and dative-marked S arguments in addition to the unmarked nominative. The semantic distinctions governing the choice of case to a great extent correspond to those posited here for the accusative and dative cases (Wijayawardhana et al. 1995). The question of a ditransitive prototype is rather more complex, for the obvious reason that ditransitives are more complex constructions. Furthermore, there is little agreement on what constitutes a prototypical ditransitive verb. Givón (2001a:142) considers “the bi-transitive prototype” to be exemplified by locative transfer constructions such as put the book on the table. More commonly, the prototypical ditransitive verb is assumed to be ‘give’; as noted in chapter 8, Newman (1998 :11) finds that “the act of giving can be considered as a basic type of act of considerable functional importance”. The prototypicality of ‘give’ has, however, been disputed; Borg and Comrie (1984) argue that ‘give’ in Maltese is “syntacti-



Chapter 9.  Beyond prototypical transitivity 

cally a very atypical ditransitive verb”, and suggest that its atypical behaviour may be attributed to its high frequency. Partly, what is at issue here is the precise definition of the term ‘ditransitive’. Kittilä (2006) examines formally ditransitive constructions in the sense of constructions having two nonsubject arguments both being treated formally in the same way as a transitive Patient – in other words, constructions which can genuinely be said to have two syntactic objects. He shows that, almost universally, if a language has any ditransitive verbs in this sense at all, ‘give’ will be among them; and an absolute universal appears to be that if a language has only one such ditransitive verb, it is always ‘give’. This is clearly a prototype pattern: crosslinguistically, the category of formally ditransitive verbs centers around ‘give’, which is always a member; while which other verbs are included in the category will vary between languages. The alleged “syntactic atypicality” of ‘give’ in certain languages, then, looks to be another case of failing to distinguish clearly between prototypicality and markedness. The fact that ‘give’ is the prototypical example of a verb found in formally ditransitive constructions in no way excludes the possibility that such constructions are in themselves rare, unusual or “marked” in a given language. Quite to the contrary, this is only to be expected in light of the analysis of formally transitive clauses as representing a relatively marked way of expressing two-participant events. In chapter 3, I suggested that the transitive construction may be treated as relatively marked in languages because keeping track of two distinct, independent participants is relatively demanding in terms of attention and processing capacity; this would presumably apply to an even greater extent to three-argument constructions. Indeed, what is demonstrated for Maltese by Borg and Comrie (1984) is precisely the high degree of ditransitivity of the verb ‘give’, in that its recipient argument shows direct-object properties to a larger extent than that of any other three-participant verb in the language. What these data suggest is not in fact that ‘give’ is an atypical ditransitive verb, but rather that ditransitivity itself is atypical. This assumption is further strenghtened by the fact that many languages entirely lack ditransitive constructions in the sense specified above; instead, threeparticipant events may be expressed in what Dixon (1994 :123) calls an extended transitive construction, that is, in a formally transitive clause with an additional oblique NP. There is an obvious parallel here to the use of a formally intransitive construction for two-participant events discussed in chapter 2, which was argued to be an unmarked way of expressing two-participant events. Furthermore, even in languages which do have formally ditransitive verbs, the set of such verbs tends to be quite small. 1. A handful of languages show counterexamples to this generalisation; see Kittilä (2006:594596).

 Prototypical Transitivity

These facts suggest a scale of naturalness of expression, with the relative markedness of a construction increasing with the number of syntactic arguments: A formally intransitive construction, with a single syntactically and pragmatically prominent participant, is the simplest and most unmarked way of encoding an event, even when a second participant may be directly involved. All languages furthermore provide the option of encoding such a second participant as equal or near-equal to the first in prominence, although languages differ in how frequently they make use of this relatively marked option (3.3). When it comes to adding a third prominent participant, some languages allow it for a restricted set of verbs, while others exclude this possibility altogether, opting instead to cast one of the nonsubject participants in an oblique frame, indicating a relatively low degree of prominence. Indeed, ditransitivity itself appears to be a matter of degree in a language like Maltese, where the recipient participants of different three-participant verbs show direct-objectlike properties to varying extents (Borg and Comrie 1984 :117–123). A further question is to what extent the insights presented here with respect to the nature of the transitive prototype can be exploited in a more detailed analysis of the ditransitive prototype. Kittilä (2006 :600) suggests that the reason for the perceived prototypicality of ‘give’ is that this verb in fact has little inherent semantic content beyond the lexicalising the basic three-participant event, namely one involving an agent, a transferred object (“theme”), and a recipient. Furthermore, he argues that the distinctness of participants may be relevant for ditransitives too, in that the agent and the recipient must be physically distinct participants; events of transfer where the agent is also the recipient, such as ‘take’ or ‘buy’, are not generally encoded as ditransitives in a strict sense. Newman (1998) shows that the transitive prototype, involving an interaction between an Agent and a Patient participant, in many languages appears to form the basis for the construal even of ditransitive events. He demonstrates how either of the two non-Agent participants, which he labels Thing and Recipient, may be construed as though it were a Patient in a transitive construction, and encoded accordingly as a syntactic direct object. That is, when a language distinguishes formally between the Thing and the Recipient (rather than using a ditransitive construction in the strict sense discussed above), encoding one as a direct object and the other as an oblique, either participant may be a candidate for the directobject slot. Languages differ in which of the two comes out on top in this competition for grammatical prominence; some may allow either, but many languages allow only one or the other (Newman 1998 :3). This competition for direct-objecthood can be understood from the current perspective as a result of the fact that the typical properties of direct objects of transitive clauses are shared between the Thing and the Recipient in a typical act of giving. The Thing is that participant which comes closest to maximal semantic



Chapter 9.  Beyond prototypical transitivity 

distinction with respect to the Agent-like Giver, as it is nonvolitional and physically affected to a certain extent, in that it is transferred from one location to another. The Recipient, on the other hand, as a volitionally involved and independent human being, and the final goal of the act of transfer, has a higher degree of pragmatic prominence, which as we have seen is also a prerequisite for objecthood in the prototypical case. Thus the distinctness of participants which is at the basis of prototypical transitivity becomes rather more complex when applied to ditransitives; unless the construction clearly distinguishes three equally distinct and independent participants, it must be determined which of the non-agentive participants is “most distinct” – from the Agent, from the general background – in the context. Depending on which criteria for distinctness are given priority, this may be either the Thing or the Recipient (see also Newman 1998 :3–4). Although the notion of a bipolar semantic opposition between a controlling and an affected participant is not directly applicable to a construction with three participants, it is possible to propose another perspective on ditransitives taking the Agent-Patient opposition as a starting point. Rather than operating with a strict dichotomy between two participant types defined in opposition to each other, it might be fruitful to construe the two participant types characteristic of transitive clauses as the endpoints of a scale, which would have as a third prominent point the Volitional Undergoer role, for which it was argued in chapter 8 that it represents the third major way in which human beings interact with their surrounding. It is possible that a ditransitive prototype might be definable as involving these three participant types; this would comply with the assumption that the prototypical ditransitive verb is ‘give’, involving an Agent, a Patient-like participant and a recipient. Clearly, though, such an analysis would require support from a systematic examination of crosslinguistic data.

9.4 Concluding remarks The more basic to the organisation of language a grammatical phenomenon is seen to be – both in the sense of having a wide range of structural implications in the grammars of individual languages, and in the sense of showing a high degree of universality across languages – the more it is reasonable to assume that this phenomenon is grounded in properties of human cognitive organisation and the basic functional motivations known to influence linguistic structure. Transitivity is perhaps among the most basic of linguistic categories; it is generally assumed to be universal, and it has repercussions for a broad range of structural phenomena, only some of which have been addressed here.

 Prototypical Transitivity

The views argued for here concerning the functional basis of the transitive prototype therefore represent an hypothesis about the organisation of some of the most fundamental aspects of linguistic structure. Although the central idea is a very simple one – syntactic prominence, in the sense of the encoding of noun phrases as independent syntactic arguments, reflects pragmatic prominence and the desire to draw particular attention to certain aspects of an event – the implications both for linguistic analysis of individual grammatical phenomena and for our general understanding of how linguistic structure is motivated by aspects of human cognition may be far-reaching. The range of linguistic phenomena related in some way to distinctions of transitivity is very large, and the ultimate test of the validity of the insights presented here will be the extent to which others find them useful in approaching a larger array of grammatical problems in a much greater number of languages than what has been considered here. Scientific inquiry is, of course, just as much about formulating interesting questions as it is about coming up with plausible answers. The fundamental questions put forward in this book are, Why is there a language-universal transitive prototype? and Why should this transitive prototype take a particular form rather than some other? Although I hope to have argued convincingly for my answers, my main hope for this book is that it will persuade its readers to take an interest in the questions.

Appendix Nonstandard abbreviations in glosses

a absential ACT active ADEL adelative ADESS adessive ADV advancement suffix AFO affected object AOR aorist AS aseverative AUG augmented number BR bound root CL classifier CONN connective CP conjunctive participle CRS currently relevant state DES desiderative DSC discontinuative EPENTH epenthesis FACT factitive GENR general tense-aspect marker GER gerund HAB habitual IM immediacy clitic

INVOL involitive LV linking vowel MD middle voice MIN minimal number NFU nonfuture NPT nonpast NRPAST near past PART partitive PAT patient PAUX preterit auxiliary POT potential PP past participle PSTWIT past witnessed RED reduplication RN relational noun SA stem augment TA tense/aspect TNS tense marker UA unit-augmented number UNM unmarked inflection $ second part of stem following endocliticisation

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Author index

A Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.  41, 69 Aissen, Judith  19, 25, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159 Allerton, D.J.  140 Amberber, Mengistu  63, 64, 65 Andrews, Avery  37–38, 41, 83, 205 Asher, Ronald E.  126, 174 Austin, Peter  75 B Baker, Mark C.  98 Barðdal, Jóhanna  89, 203–204 Bashir, Elena  159 Bhat, D.N.S.  100, 157, 170, 188–189 Bickel, Balthasar  187–88, 195, 197 Blake, Barry J.  46, 67, 69–70, 101, 118, 168, 197, 198 Blansitt, Edward L.  197 Borg, Albert J.  214, 215, 216 Bornkessel, Ina  166 Bossong, Georg  19, 154, 188, 189, 190–191, 205 Brennenstuhl, Waltraud  45 Brisson, Christine  128, 131–132 Brown, Lea  195–196 Burenhult, Niclas  97 Butt, Miriam  207 C Camp, Elizabeth L.  182 Campbell, Lyle  102 Caughley, Ross Charles  71, 72, 162 Chomsky, Noam  211 Chung, Sandra  119 Churchward, C. Maxwell  172, 173

Comrie, Bernard  18, 19, 74, 97, 101, 119, 154, 158, 164, 171–172, 178, 179, 182, 189, 200,  201, 210, 214, 215, 216 Cooreman, Ann  20, 21, 141 Craig, Colette Grinevald  158 Cristofaro, Sonia  4 Croft, William  3, 47, 56, 99, 185–186, 191, 195 Crowell, Thomas Harris  68 Crowley, Terry  74, 179 Cruse, D.A.  32, 33, 93 Cysouw, Michael  21 D Dahlstrom, Amy  36 Davison, Alice  76 DeLancey, Scott  16, 33, 98–99, 178 Delbecque, Nicole  163 Demers, Richard A.  180 de Swart, Peter  18, 174 Dixon, R.M.W.  6, 7, 42, 64, 69, 74, 154, 157, 159, 168, 169, 175–179, 182, 184, 196, 215 Donaldson, Tamsin  73, 180 Donohue, Mark  136–137 Dowty, David  33, 35, 37, 78, 113, 186 Drossard, Werner  145–149 DuBois, John W.  4, 48 Dunn, Michael  21 Duranti, Alessandro  103 E Emeneau, M.B.  64 England, Nora  163–164 F Farkas, Donka F.  45 Farrell, Tim  76

Fillmore, Charles J.  32–33, 54, 55, 125, 129–130, 135, 141, 143, 157, 198 Foley, William A.  198, 204–207 Fortescue, Michael  20 Fried, Mirjam  92 Fromm, Hans  118 G Gair, James W.  64, 207 Gerdts, Donna B.  156 Givón, Talmy  2, 4, 15, 29, 33, 47, 70–71, 90, 157, 159, 214 Goddard, Cliff  178, 179 Goldberg, Adele  55, 128, 132–133, 139 Gordon, Lynn  64 Grimshaw, Jane  128 Gruber, Jeffrey S.  33, 45 Guerssel, M.  65 Guirardello, Raquel  68 H Haiman, John  4 Hale, Kenneth  205 Harris, Alice C.  168 Harris, Herbert R.  163 Haspelmath, Martin  8, 13, 39, 53, 145, 146, 149, 161, 199 Haude, Katharina  69 Haviland, John  40, 75, 178, 180 Heath, Jeffrey  125, 141, 179 Hercus, L.A.  126 Holisky, Dee Ann  33 Hopper, Paul J.  1, 2, 7, 15, 16, 18, 31, 43, 77, 86, 104–105, 113, 114, 118, 127, 138, 154, 157,  162, 165 Hovdhaugen, Even  58–60, 96, 103 Hualde, José Ignacio  155, 204 I Iwasaki, Shoichi  103

 Prototypical Transitivity J Jackendoff, Ray  33, 45–46, 67 Jaxontov, Sergej J.  53 Jelinek, Eloise  180 Johnson, Mary Jeanette  126 Johnson, Steve  180 Josephs, Lewis S.  64 K Karjalainen, Merja  120 Kazenin, Konstantin  83 Keen, Sandra  170 Keenan, Edward L.  75 Kemmer, Suzanne  5, 22–23, 28–29, 31, 56, 57, 61, 82, 90, 214 Kibrik, Alexandr E.  55, 126 King, Tracy Holloway  207 Kiparsky, Paul  120, 121 Kittilä, Seppo  5, 13–15, 17, 39, 43, 52, 82–83, 94, 96, 164, 215, 216 Klaiman, Miriam H.  45, 52–53, 89, 186–187, 199 Klamer, Marian  126, 127 Kornfilt, Jaklin  140 Krämer, Martin  62 Kumari, T.C. 126, 174 L Lakämper, Renate  211 Lakoff, George  2, 4, 15 Lamiroy, Béatrice  163 Langacker, Ronald W.  33, 41, 52, 97, 99 LaPolla, Randy J.  35, 37, 45, 76, 77, 79–81, 94, 103, 108, 124, 126, 131, 132 Lazard, Gilbert  2, 15–17 Lehmann, Christian  205 LeSourd, Philip  19 Levin, Beth  128 Lewis, Geoffrey  140 Li, Charles N.  105 Lincoln, P.C.  13 Lord, Carol  106 Lorimer, D.L.R.  176 Lyons, John  22 M Magier, David  161 Maisak, Timur  77 Malchukov, Andrey L.  200 Marantz, Alec P.  126, 129 Maring, Joel Marvyl  61 Masica, Colin P.  52–54 Maslova, Elena  42, 174–175

McAlpin, David W.  101 McLendon, Sally  196 Miestamo, Matti  42, 118 Mithun, Marianne  60, 113, 169 Mittwoch, Anita  131 Mohanan, K.P.  41, 186, 202 Mohanan, Tara  100, 176, 199 Mondloch, James L.  144 Moravcsik, Edith A.  166 Morphy, Frances  179, 205 Mosel, Ulrike  58–60, 96, 103, 123 N Narasimhan, Bhuvana  188 Nedjalkov, Vladimir P.  53 Newman, John  79, 142, 143, 198, 214, 216–217 Nichols, Johanna  205 Nicklas, Thurston Dale  204 Ningomba, M.S.  100, 157, 170 Næss, Åshild  18, 21, 113, 158, 164, 198 O Owens, Jonathan  73 P Palmer, Frank R.  42, 141, 198 Pandharipande, Rajeshwari V.  199 Paol, John Natu  154 Paolillo, John C.  64 Payne, Doris L.  137–138 R Rappaport Hovav, Malka  128 Reesink, Ger  21 Reinhart, Tanya  86 Rice, Keren  67 Rice, Sally  55, 79, 130, 139, 141–143 Roberts, John R.  54 Rosch, Eleanor  4, 11–12 Ross, Malcolm  154 Rozwadowska, Bożena  87–88, 96, 99, 102 Rumsey, Alan  165 S Sadeniemi, Matti  118 Sadock, Jerrold M.  60 Sakel, Jeanette  55 Saksena, Anuradha  53, 65–67, 201

Sands, Kristina  102 Sasse, Hans-Jürgen  32 Schlesewsky, Mathias  166 Schlesinger, I.M.  34, 42 Schulze, Wolfgang  194 Seiler, Walter  126 Seiter, William J.  165 Shaumyan, Sebastian  176 Shibatani, Masayoshi  29, 101, 103, 166–167, 195 Silverstein, Michael  177 Smith, Ian  180 Smith, Michael B.  91, 169 Sneddon, J.N.  126, 127 Sohn, Ho-Min  126 Sridhar, S.N.  199, 201 Starosta, Stanley  53, 67 Sulkala, Helena  120 Svantesson, Jan-Olof  14 T Taylor, John R.  4, 29 Tenny, Carol L.  55, 56–57, 77, 78, 119 Terrill, Angela  21 Testelec, Yakov G.  45, 82, 103, 194 Thompson, Sandra A.  1, 2, 7, 15, 16, 18, 31, 43, 77, 86, 105, 114, 118, 138, 154, 157, 162,  165 Timberlake, Alan  119 Topping, Donald M.  20, 55 Tsunoda, Tasaku  191, 193 V Valenzuela, Pilar M.  164 Van Belle, William  197, 198 van Gijn, Rik  91–92, 191 Van Hoecke, Willy  207 Van Langendonck, Willy  46, 197, 198 Van Valin, Robert D.  33, 35–37, 45, 77, 79–81, 94, 103, 107–109, 124, 126, 131, 132, 191–192 Vendler, Zeno  80 Verma, Manindra K.  41, 186, 187 Versalainen, Marja  188 Versalainen, Olavi  188 Viberg, Åke  192–193 Vikner, Sten  128 W Watkins, Laurel Jayne  36, 100–101 Wells, Margaret A.  191

Wierzbicka, Anna  17, 31, 53, 159–160, 165, 178 Wijayawardhana, G.D.  45, 94–95, 96, 214

Author index  Wilkins, David P.  33, 35–36, 45, 107, 107, 109, 191–192 Williams, Corinne J.  154 Woodbury, Anthony C.  126 Wunderlich, Dieter  62, 211

Wurm, Stephen A.  13, 179

Language index

A Abkhaz  38 Adyghe  38 Amele  54 Amharic  63–64 Äiwoo  13–14, 21 B Bāgandji  55, 126, 127 Bagvalal  77 Balochi  76 Basque  171, 172 Belhare  195 Bengali  186–187, 199 Berber  64–65, 126–127 Bhojpuri  187 Bislama  76–77 Bororo  68, 69, 71 Bunuba  165 Burushaski  176

Even  200, 202 F Fijian  76 Finnish  42–43, 82–83, 96, 102, 106, 118–120, 134, 154, 173, 193, 194 Fore  158 French, Québec  76 Futuna, East  93–94, 193, 194 G German  13–14, 39, 82, 104, 146–147, 148, 163, 166 Godoberi  55, 126–127 Greek  2, 76, 83, 197 Greenlandic  60, 83 Greenlandic, West  20 Guugu Yimidhirr  40, 75, 158, 178, 180

C Cashinawa  179 Catalan  19, 154–155, 204 Cavineña  182 Chamorro  20–21, 55 Chechen  205 Chepang  71, 95, 161–162 Choctaw  204 Chukchi  148, 172, 173 Comox  163

H Halkomelem  156 Hare  98, 110 Hebrew  19, 55, 154, 155 Hidatsa  169 Hindi  52, 53, 65–67, 76, 100, 176, 188, 201

D Diyari  75 Djapu  179, 205 Dulong/Rawang  76 Duungidjawu  179 Dyirbal  74, 158

J Jahai  97 Jakaltek  158–159, 171 Japanese  83, 94, 101, 103, 195, 200, 202

E English  7, 13–14, 22, 35, 36, 49, 54–56, 76, 78–81, 97, 104–105, 107, 109, 126, 129–135, 138, 140, 142–145, 147, 148, 154, 185, 193

I Icelandic  41, 89, 91, 203–204 Imonda  55, 126–127

K Kalkatungu  69–70, 71, 118 Kambera  126–127 Kannada  188–189, 199, 201, 202 Keresan  61, 62 Khmu’  14

Kiowa  36, 100 Kolami  63–64 Korean  75, 76, 126, 195 Kugu Nganhcara  180 L Lak  83 Latin  2, 197, 207 Laz  168 Lezgian  39, 146, 199 Lhomi  188 Lotha  36 Lummi  180 M Machiguenga  55 Malay  96 Malayalam  55, 101, 126, 174, 202 Maltese  214–215, 216 Mam  163–164 Mandarin  105, 192–193 Manipuri see Meithei Marathi  199 Maricopa  64 Marwari  161 Meithei  100, 157, 159, 170–171, 183 Mosetén  55 Movima  69, 71 N Nadëb  182 Newari  70–71 Newari, Kathmandu  187 Ngiyambaa  73, 180 Nias  195–196 Niuean  164–165 Norwegian  75 Nyawaygi  179 O Oromo  72–73

 Prototypical Transitivity P Paamese  74 Palauan  63–64 Persian  76 Pitjantjatjara  19 Podopa  159 Polish  76 Pomo, Central  113 Pomo, Eastern  196 Punjabi  158 Q Quiché  144 R Ritharngu  179 Russian  101, 120–121, 134, 159–160, 185 S Samoan  14, 58–60, 83, 96, 103, 146–149, 170, 173 Sanskrit  89

Shipibo-Conibo  164, 165 Sinhala  19, 45, 63–64, 71, 75, 94–96, 207, 208, 214 Siroi  191 Spanish  101 Squamish  180 Svan  194 T Tibetan, Lhasa  97 Tondano  126–127 Tongan  43, 147, 148, 172, 173 Trumai  68, 69, 71, 83 Tsez  101 Tukang Besi  136–137 Turkish  19, 55, 75, 139–140, 200 U Udi  194 Uradhi  179 Urdu  207

V Vietnamese  192 W Wakhi  159 Waris  206, 207 Warlpiri  205 Waskia  154, 173 Y Yagua  137–138 Yessan-Mayo  204–205 Yidiny  42, 178, 179, 183–184 Yukaghir, Kolyma  41–42, 174–175 Yukatek  61–62, 63 Yukulta  170 Yup’ik  60, 126–127 Yurakaré  91–92, 191 Yuwaalaraay  154, 173

Subject index

A active alignment see split-intransitive affectedness  15, 28, 38, 42–46, 51, 52, 54–57, 59–60, 63, 67, 69, 70–76, 78, 79, 82–83, 87, 90, 92, 95, 97–98, 102, 104, 106, 111–113, 115, 116, 119, 120, 142–144, 153, 157, 159, 160, 162, 165–167, 176, 180, 185, 188–196, 198, 199, 204, 205, 206, 210, 212, 214 agent  15, 22–23, 28–30, 32–42, 44–46, 49, 52, 58, 59, 61, 69, 71, 73, 77, 79–83, 97, 108, 137, 139, 141–144, 146–150, 161–164, 176, 178, 216 affectedness of  53–83, 90, 126–128, 135–136, 139, 142–144, 149, 173, 202 Aktionsart  80, 131 accomplishment  80, 81, 131–132 achievement  80, 186, 188, 191 activity  62, 80–81, 131–132, 149, 186, 187, 191 state  80, 186–188, 191 ambitransitives  55, 124, 145–151 animacy  18, 19, 25, 28, 30, 31, 33, 42, 47, 65, 92, 93, 94, 111, 113, 138, 154–159, 166, 174, 176–181, 188, 198, 203–205, 207–208 Animacy Hierarchy see Nominal Hierarchy antipassive  7, 21, 42, 69–70, 141, 144 applicative  62, 63, 91, 92 aspect  15, 49, 61–63, 114, 118–122, 137, 141, 171, 175–176 imperfective  15, 61–63, 69, 118–121, 141, 172, 176 perfective  15, 61–63, 77, 118–119, 127, 172, 175, 176

augmented number  21 B beneficiary  28, 46, 90–93, 100, 156, 198, 199, 206 C case absolutive  58–60, 69, 83, 118, 146, 148, 149, 171–173, 182, 193–196, 205 accusative  14, 39, 42–43, 65–67, 89, 100, 146, 148, 153, 154, 159–160, 163, 166–167, 174, 176–183, 185, 193–195, 197, 200, 203, 212–214 dative  14, 39, 41, 64, 68–71, 89, 91, 95–96, 101, 118, 157, 163, 167, 185–188, 191, 194, 197–208, 212–214 ergative  36, 39, 40, 58–60, 69, 70, 83, 94, 96, 101, 118, 146, 153, 154, 159, 160, 164–167, 168–173, 175–184, 193–195, 197, 205, 211–213 genitive  159, 160, 187, 198, 199 instrumental  65–67, 95, 96, 184, 201–202, 213 nominative  39, 40, 103, 146, 148, 182, 193, 195, 213, 214 partitive  42–43, 102, 120, 193, 194 case-marking, discriminatory analysis of  153–159, 161, 162 indexing analysis of  153, 159–162 categorisation  4, 11, 12, 23, 27, 29, 190 causative  52, 53, 62–68, 89, 96, 136, 161, 200–202 “Comrie’s generalisation”  18–25

control  33, 45, 76, 82, 102, 115, 153, 159, 166, 176, 182, 185, 186, 188–196, 198, 206, 207, 210, 211, 212, 214 D definiteness  18, 19, 25, 28, 30, 31, 43, 47, 65, 111, 112, 120, 121, 125, 141, 154–158, 160, 176, 181–182, 205 differential object marking  19, 154–160, 205 discourse prominence  132–133 distinctness of participants  23, 27, 30, 43, 46, 48, 49, 51, 77, 85, 86, 111, 121, 128, 141, 151, 173, 210, 214, 216, 217 distinguishability of participants  5, 22–23, 28, 29, 57, 90 ditransitives  156–157, 197, 200, 205, 212–217 E economy  4, 12, 47–49, 177, 179, 180 effected objects  103–106, 113, 127–128, 133, 135, 136, 139, 144, 150, 165 Effector  36, 45, 80, 107–109 elaboration of events  22 Endpoint  28–30, 56, 57, 61, 63, 90, 126, 144 experiencer  28, 41, 42, 69, 82, 90–92, 100, 116, 127, 185–196, 197–199 extended intransitive  7, 8, 69, 86, 185 extended transitive  215 F functional explanations  3, 4, 47 G generic objects  81, 105, 172, 173

 Prototypical Transitivity I iconicity  4, 5, 46–49, 155 inchoative-causative verb pairs  145–151 incremental theme  78, 79 indefinite object deletion  54–55, 69, 80, 124–145, 150–151, 171, 172 individuation  15, 17–19, 23, 25, 28, 30–32, 47, 111, 122, 155, 157, 165, 166, 173, 210 information processing  3, 4, 47, 48, 180, 215 ingestive verbs  52–53, 55, 63–65, 73, 74, 104, 126, 129, 141, 201–202 inherent arguments  80–81 inherent properties  31, 38, 40–43, 112–114, 120, 180–182 initiation see instigation Initiator  28–30, 57, 61, 82, 90 instigation  33, 36, 42, 44, 45, 54, 87, 97, 99, 102, 109, 110, 114, 115, 180–182, 188, 189, 199, 202, 214 instrument  67, 80, 86–87, 96–97, 99 intentionality see volitionality inverse marking  18, 19 M macroroles  80, 81, 131 actor  80 undergoer  80, 81 malefactive  92, 93 markedness  16, 18–20, 24, 25, 31, 32, 47–49, 155, 158, 162, 176, 210, 215, 216 markedness reversal  157, 158 Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis  30, 44, 51, 52, 72, 77, 89, 90 measuring arguments  55–57, 77 middle  22, 28, 69, 82, 89, 90 minimal number  21 mood  15, 49, 114, 117, 118 realis  15 irrealis  15, 118 N negation  15, 41, 42, 49, 102, 114–117, 120–122, 138

Nominal Hierarchy  18, 158–159, 177, 178, 179 O object, direct  7, 8, 12, 14, 32, 54, 55, 57, 61, 62, 70, 123, 124, 125, 129, 141, 156, 161, 193, 209–210, 215, indirect  92, 197, 200, 205, 212, 213 oblique  14, 21, 43, 68, 69, 71, 141, 156, 193, 216 object incorporation  7, 49, 172 obligatory participants  6–8 P participant roles  35–37, 86, 108, 169, 170, 198 Affected Agent  46, 52–57, 61, 62, 66, 67, 72, 81–83, 85, 87, 109–111, 126, 128, 135, 136, 173, 188, 190, 202 Agent  37, 44–46, 72, 85, 88, 93, 94, 109–111, 114, 115, 135, 166–173, 180, 181, 183, 184, 188, 190, 194, 198, 202, 209, 216, 217 Force  93–96, 98, 109, 110, 115, 163, 170–172, 184, 190 Frustrative  99–102, 109, 114–116 Instrument  87, 88, 96–99, 109, 110, 116, 170, 184, 202, 213 Neutral  88, 102–106, 109, 115–117, 120, 170, 190 Patient  37, 44–46, 72, 85, 89, 92, 98, 109–111, 116, 128, 135, 166–172, 174, 180, 181, 183, 190, 194, 198, 209, 215–217 Volitional Undergoer  89–93, 109, 116, 185, 189, 190, 198, 206, 208, 217 passive  7, 17, 73, 101, 140, 161 patient  15, 18, 22, 23, 28–33, 37, 38, 42, 44, 46, 56, 58–60, 65, 69, 79, 81, 97, 126, 128, 132, 133, 136, 137, 139, 146–150, 161, 196, 207 pragmatic prominence  17, 23, 32, 48, 49, 197, 210, 216–218 prototypes  2–5, 11–17, 20, 23–27, 29, 46–49, 210, 213–218 possessive  101, 199

R recipient  28, 90–92, 156, 157, 161, 197–199, 205, 208, 216, 217 reciprocal  22, 28, 29, 73 referentiality  80, 104, 111–113, 127–128, 131, 135, 144, 151, 164, 165, 172, 173 reflexive  22, 28, 29, 40, 72–75, 78, 79, 101, 127 relational properties  31, 38, 40, 180 Role and Reference Grammar (RRG)  36, 79, 80 S salience  23, 47, 48, 57, 69, 113, 169, 198 sentience  41, 87, 90, 92, 198, 203, 204, 206–208 serial verb constructions  106 speech-act participants  18, 19 split ergativity  158, 171, 175–184 split-intransitive  36, 168, 169, 175–177, 196, 214 stimulus of experience verb  102, 103, 105, 156, 186, 189–194, 197 structural case  197, 211–213 subcategorisation  37, 85, 107–110 subject  22, 30, 31, 36, 37, 41, 42, 53, 62, 63, 67, 70, 72, 73, 76, 78, 79, 93, 94, 98, 100, 101, 107, 109, 110, 114–116, 153–159, 161–166, 171–174, 182, 183, 186, 191, 206, 207, 209–210 syntactically privileged arguments  6, 7, 14 T telicity  15, 77–79, 81, 135 thematic relations see thematic roles thematic roles  35–37, 45, 46, 86, 87, 99, 107–109 Theme  45, 46, 86, 87, 98, 216 V valency  123, 129, 146, 147, 149 volitionality  15, 28, 33, 35, 36, 39–42, 44, 45, 51, 54, 82, 87, 89–95, 97, 99, 102, 107, 109, 111, 161–166, 180, 182, 188, 189, 199, 200, 203, 206, 208, 212, 214

Typological Studies in Language A complete list of titles in this series can be found on the publishers’ website, www.benjamins.com 73 Ansaldo, Umberto, Stephen Matthews and Lisa Lim (eds.): Deconstructing Creole. 2007. xii, 292 pp. 72 Næss, Åshild: Prototypical Transitivity. 2007. ix, 240 pp. 71 Nedjalkov, Vladimir P. (ed.): Reciprocal Constructions. With the assistance of Emma Š. Geniušienė and Zlatka Guentchéva. xxviii, 2083 pp. + index (4 vols.). Expected August 2007 70 Zúñiga, Fernando: Deixis and Alignment. Inverse systems in indigenous languages of the Americas. 2006. xii, 309 pp. 69 Aranovich, Raúl (ed.): Split Auxiliary Systems. A cross-linguistic perspective. 2007. vii, 277 pp. 68 Abraham, Werner and Larisa Leisiö (eds.): Passivization and Typology. Form and function. 2006. x, 553 pp. 67 Veselinova, Ljuba N.: Suppletion in Verb Paradigms. Bits and pieces of the puzzle. 2006. xviii, 236 pp. 66 Hickmann, Maya and Stéphane Robert (eds.): Space in Languages. Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories. 2006. x, 362 pp. 65 Tsunoda, Tasaku and Taro Kageyama (eds.): Voice and Grammatical Relations. In Honor of Masayoshi Shibatani. 2006. xviii, 342 pp. 64 Voeltz, F. K. Erhard (ed.): Studies in African Linguistic Typology. 2006. xiv, 426 pp. 63 Filimonova, Elena (ed.): Clusivity. Typology and case studies of the inclusive–exclusive distinction. 2005. xii, 436 pp. 62 Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth and Cecilia E. Ford (eds.): Sound Patterns in Interaction. Crosslinguistic studies from conversation. 2004. viii, 406 pp. 61 Bhaskararao, Peri and Karumuri Venkata Subbarao (eds.): Non-nominative Subjects. Volume 2. 2004. xii, 319 pp. 60 Bhaskararao, Peri and Karumuri Venkata Subbarao (eds.): Non-nominative Subjects. Volume 1. 2004. xii, 325 pp. 59 Fischer, Olga, Muriel Norde and Harry Perridon (eds.): Up and down the Cline – The Nature of Grammaticalization. 2004. viii, 406 pp. 58 Haspelmath, Martin (ed.): Coordinating Constructions. 2004. xcv, 578 pp. 57 Mattissen, Johanna: Dependent-Head Synthesis in Nivkh. A contribution to a typology of polysynthesis. 2003. x, 350 pp. 56 Shay, Erin and Uwe Seibert (eds.): Motion, Direction and Location in Languages. In honor of Zygmunt Frajzyngier. 2003. xvi, 305 pp. 55 Frajzyngier, Zygmunt and Erin Shay: Explaining Language Structure through Systems Interaction. 2003. xviii, 309 pp. 54 Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. and R.M.W. Dixon (eds.): Studies in Evidentiality. 2003. xiv, 349 pp. 53 Givón, T. and Bertram F. Malle (eds.): The Evolution of Language out of Pre-language. 2002. x, 394 pp. 52 Güldemann, Tom and Manfred von Roncador (eds.): Reported Discourse. A meeting ground for different linguistic domains. 2002. xii, 425 pp. 51 Newman, John (ed.): The Linguistics of Sitting, Standing and Lying. 2002. xii, 409 pp. 50 Feigenbaum, Susanne and Dennis Kurzon (eds.): Prepositions in their Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Context. 2002. vi, 304 pp. 49 Wischer, Ilse and Gabriele Diewald (eds.): New Reflections on Grammaticalization. 2002. xiv, 437 pp. 48 Shibatani, Masayoshi (ed.): The Grammar of Causation and Interpersonal Manipulation. 2002. xviii, 551 pp. 47 Baron, Irène, Michael Herslund and Finn Sørensen (eds.): Dimensions of Possession. 2001. vi, 337 pp. 46 Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y., R.M.W. Dixon and Masayuki Onishi (eds.): Non-canonical Marking of Subjects and Objects. 2001. xii, 364 pp. 45 Bybee, Joan and Paul J. Hopper (eds.): Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. 2001. vii, 492 pp. 44 Voeltz, F. K. Erhard and Christa Kilian-Hatz (eds.): Ideophones. 2001. x, 436 pp.

43 Gildea, Spike (ed.): Reconstructing Grammar. Comparative Linguistics and Grammaticalization. 2000. xiv, 269 pp. 42 Diessel, Holger: Demonstratives. Form, function and grammaticalization. 1999. xii, 205 pp. 41 Frajzyngier, Zygmunt and Traci S. Curl (eds.): Reciprocals. Forms and functions. Volume 2. 2000. xii, 201 pp. 40 Frajzyngier, Zygmunt and Traci S. Curl (eds.): Reflexives. Forms and functions. Volume 1. 2000. xiv, 286 pp. 39 Payne, Doris L. and Immanuel Barshi (eds.): External Possession. 1999. ix, 573 pp. 38 Siewierska, Anna and Jae Jung Song (eds.): Case, Typology and Grammar. In honor of Barry J. Blake. 1998. 395 pp. 37 Giacalone-Ramat, Anna and Paul J. Hopper (eds.): The Limits of Grammaticalization. 1998. vi, 307 pp. 36 Newman, John (ed.): The Linguistics of Giving. 1998. xv, 373 pp. 35 Givón, T. (ed.): Grammatical Relations. A functionalist perspective. 1997. viii, 350 pp. 34 Givón, T. (ed.): Conversation. Cognitive, communicative and social perspectives. 1997. viii, 302 pp. 33 Fox, Barbara A. (ed.): Studies in Anaphora. 1996. xii, 518 pp. 32 Bybee, Joan and Suzanne Fleischman (eds.): Modality in Grammar and Discourse. 1995. viii, 575 pp. 31 Gernsbacher, Morton Ann and T. Givón (eds.): Coherence in Spontaneous Text. 1995. x, 267 pp. 30 Downing, Pamela A. and Michael Noonan (eds.): Word Order in Discourse. 1995. x, 595 pp. 29 Kahrel, Peter (PJK) and René van den Berg (eds.): Typological Studies in Negation. 1994. x, 385 pp. 28 Givón, T. (ed.): Voice and Inversion. 1994. viii, 402 pp. 27 Fox, Barbara A. and Paul J. Hopper (eds.): Voice: Form and Function. 1994. xiii, 377 pp. 26 Lord, Carol: Historical Change in Serial Verb Constructions. 1993. x, 273 pp. 25 Svorou, Soteria: The Grammar of Space. 1994. xiv, 290 pp. 24 Perkins, Revere D.: Deixis, Grammar, and Culture. 1992. x, 245 pp. 23 Kemmer, Suzanne: The Middle Voice. 1993. xii, 300 pp. 22 Payne, Doris L. (ed.): Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility. 1992. viii, 320 pp. 21 Downing, Pamela A., Susan D. Lima and Michael Noonan (eds.): The Linguistics of Literacy. 1992. xx, 334 pp. 20 Croft, William, Suzanne Kemmer and Keith Denning (eds.): Studies in Typology and Diachrony. Papers presented to Joseph H. Greenberg on his 75th birthday. 1990. xxxiv, 243 pp. 19:2 Closs Traugott, Elizabeth and Bernd Heine (eds.): Approaches to Grammaticalization. Volume II. Types of grammatical markers. 1991. xii, 558 pp. 19:1 Closs Traugott, Elizabeth and Bernd Heine (eds.): Approaches to Grammaticalization. Volume I. Theoretical and methodological issues. 1991. xii, 360 pp. 18 Haiman, John and Sandra A. Thompson (eds.): Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse. 1988. xiii, 428 pp. 17 Hammond, Michael, Edith Moravcsik and Jessica Wirth (eds.): Studies in Syntactic Typology. 1988. xiv, 380 pp. 16 Shibatani, Masayoshi (ed.): Passive and Voice. 1988. xi, 706 pp. 15 Austin, Peter (ed.): Complex Sentence Constructions in Australian Languages. 1988. vii, 289 pp. 14 Hinds, John, Shoichi Iwasaki and Senko K. Maynard (eds.): Perspectives on Topicalization. The case of Japanese WA. 1987. xi, 307 pp. 13 Never published. 12 Nedjalkov, Vladimir P. (ed.): Typology of Resultative Constructions. Translated from the original Russian edition (1983). Translation edited by Bernard Comrie. 1988. xx, 573 pp. 11 Tomlin, Russell S.: Coherence and Grounding in Discourse. Outcome of a Symposium, Eugene, Oregon, June 1984. 1987. viii, 512 pp. 10 Ransom, Evelyn N.: Complementation: its Meaning and Forms. 1986. xii, 226 pp. 9 Bybee, Joan: Morphology. A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form. 1985. xii, 235 pp. 8 Slobin, Dan I. and Karl Zimmer (eds.): Studies in Turkish Linguistics. 1986. vi, 294 pp. 7 Craig, Colette G. (ed.): Noun Classes and Categorization. Proceedings of a symposium on categorization and noun classification, Eugene, Oregon, October 1983. 1986. vii, 481 pp.

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Haiman, John (ed.): Iconicity in Syntax. Proceedings of a symposium on iconicity in syntax, Stanford, June 24–26, 1983. 1985. vi, 402 pp. Rutherford, William E. (ed.): Language Universals and Second Language Acquisition. 1984. ix, 264 pp. Chisholm, William, Louis T. Milic and John A.C. Greppin (eds.): Interrogativity. A colloquium on the grammar, typology and pragmatics of questions in seven diverse languages, Cleveland, Ohio, October 5th 1981-May 3rd 1982. 1984. v, 302 pp. Givón, T.: Topic Continuity in Discourse. A quantitative cross-language study. 1983. vi, 492 pp. Haiman, John and Pamela Munro (eds.): Switch Reference and Universal Grammar. Proceedings of a symposium on switch reference and universal grammar, Winnipeg, May 1981. 1983. xv, 337 pp. Hopper, Paul J. (ed.): Tense-Aspect. Between semantics & pragmatics. 1982. x, 350 pp.