Transitivity on a continuum: the transitivity index as a predictor of Spanish causatives

Gustavo Guajardo

doi:10.1515/cllt-2021-0019

Abstract

AbstractThis paper contributes to the study of transitivity as a general property of the clause. Unlike most previous work on the subject, however, transitivity in the present article is used to study a lexical alternation, namely the two causative predicatesdejar‘let’ andhacer‘make’ in Spanish. To do this, I use the transitivity index (TI), a weighted continuous measure of transitivity based on Hopper and Thompson’s (1980, transitivity in grammar and discourse,Language56, 251–299) transitivity parameters. The advantage of the TI is that it assigns different weights to each of the transitivity parameters and it is therefore sensitive to the particular construction it is applied to. I show that the TI can correctly predict the two Spanish causativesdejar‘let’ andhacer‘make’ with 80% accuracy and demonstrate thathaceris associated with higher transitivity contexts. In addition, linguistic features of the causer such as grammatical person and number are found to help distinguish between the two predicates. The finding that a lexical alternation can be reduced to a difference in transitivity raises important questions regarding the structure of the lexicon and the type of information it may contain.

Highlights

Transitivity is a pervasive, perhaps universal, phenomenon in natural language (Næss 2007), defined as the effects of an action performed by an agent on a patient (e.g., Lazard 1998; Lyons 1968; Tsunoda 1985)
I show that the transitivity index (TI) can correctly predict the two Spanish causatives dejar ‘let’ and hacer ‘make’ with 80% accuracy and demonstrate that hacer is associated with higher transitivity contexts
When Peninsular Spanish is removed from the sample, the amount of data containing dative clitics decreases substantially so we find no preference for the dative clitic

Summary

Introduction

Transitivity is a pervasive, perhaps universal, phenomenon in natural language (Næss 2007), defined as the effects of an action performed by an agent on a patient (e.g., Lazard 1998; Lyons 1968; Tsunoda 1985). Under this semantic definition, features such as agency, volitionality and affectedness are important aspects. The more traditional view considers transitivity a property of verbs not clauses (Lazard 1998) Under this definition, verbs such as kick and eat (i.e., eventives) are as transitive as mean and know (i.e., states). In other definitions based on structural considerations the type of arguments is taken into account to classify a clause as transitive or intransitive: clauses with accusative patients or ergative agents are considered transitive, whereas a clause that has two arguments but no patient, for example, is not (Drossard 1991; Helbig and Buscha 1993)

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