Towards a structural typology of verb classes

Abstract

After the introduction, section 2 considers prototypical transitive verbs. Section 3 turns to intransitive verbs and their relationship to transitive ones, and also considers the active-inactive type of argument linking (3.4). Section 4 deals with further argument linking types for transitive verbs: the inverse type (4.1), the salience or voice type (4.2), the positional type (4.3), and the generalized case type (4.4), the latter comprising accusative, ergative and split systems, and the possibility of dative. Section 5 considers ways of marking special semantic classes of verbs lexically. Section 6 discusses how a third argument is integrated, and thus extends the typology of section 4. It deals with the semantic decomposition of ditransitive verbs (6.1) and general principles of constraining it (6.2), considers serial verb constructions and noun incorporation as argument-reducing operations (6.3), turns to constructions where the recipient is treated like the object of a transitive verb (6.4) or differently from the object of a transitive verb (6.5), and closes with a new look on the English ‘dative’ alternation, which is compared with the double object/serial verb alternation in some West African languages.