Transitivity prominence within and across modalities

Carl Börstell,Tommi Jantunen,Vadim Kimmelman,Johanna Mesch,Vanja De Lint,Marloes Oomen

doi:10.1515/opli-2019-0037

Abstract

AbstractWe investigate transitivity prominence of verbs across signed and spoken languages, based on data from both valency dictionaries and corpora. Our methodology relies on the assumption that dictionary data and corpus-based measures of transitivity are comparable, and we find evidence in support of this through the direct comparison of these two types of data across several spoken languages. For the signed modality, we measure the transitivity prominence of verbs in five sign languages based on corpus data and compare the results to the transitivity prominence hierarchy for spoken languages reported in Haspelmath (2015). For each sign language, we create a hierarchy for 12 verb meanings based on the proportion of overt direct objects per verb meaning. We use these hierarchies to calculate correlations between languages – both signed and spoken – and find positive correlations between transitivity hierarchies. Additional findings of this study include the observation that locative arguments seem to behave differently than direct objects judging by our measures of transitivity, and that relatedness among sign languages does not straightforwardly imply similarity in transitivity hierarchies. We conclude that our findings provide support for a modality-independent, semantic basis of transitivity.

Highlights

Transitivity has traditionally been recognized as a central notion in the organization of sentences in natural languages
After confirming the validity of the comparison of data from the two types of sources – i.e., valency dictionary classification vs. corpus data – we address the primary aim of the study: to investigate whether the transitivity prominence of verbs across sign languages is correlated, and whether this can be extended across modalities to correlations with the transitivity prominence of spoken languages
The distribution of each of the 12 verb meanings we studied is plotted in Figure 1.11 The graph shows the pattern that transitive verbs take

Summary

Introduction

Transitivity has traditionally been recognized as a central notion in the organization of sentences in natural languages (see e.g., Dixon, 1979; Hopper and Thompson, 1980; Dowty, 1982; Næss, 2007; Kittilä, 2010). While a wealth of research into the topic has been published over the years, the work has primarily focused on languages in the spoken modality (see Section 1.1). An exception is Kimmelman (2016), who investigated transitivity in Russian Sign Language (RSL; Section 1.2). This study builds on Kimmelman’s work but extends the scope to five sign languages, enabling comparisons both within and across modalities. It is an extension of previous work by including a comparison of transitivity prominence between dictionary and corpus data, within the spoken modality.

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion