Intransitive Construction Research Articles

Hybrid subjects in Spanish and Catalan: Halfway between Agents and Patients

We analyze an intransitive construction involving verbs like Spanish matarse ‘kill’ whose subjects appear to have both internal and external argument properties. Examples include Juan se mató en un accidente de coche ‘Juan got himself killed in a car accident’, in which the subject’s referent shows hybrid behavior between agent and patient as it needs to be engaged in an action leading to its accidental death. We propose that the subject’s internal and external argument properties can be accounted for if subjects can bear two semantic roles by virtue of being associated with more than one distinct head in the syntax (Pineda & Berro 2020). We argue that such intransitive uses involve a distinct argument structure from transitive reflexives despite sharing the same surface form, cf., El sospechoso del homicidio se mató al estar rodeado por la policía ‘The suspect killed himself when he was surrounded by the police’. The present account provides evidence that agents and external arguments do not always correlate since some verb classes can have identical surface form, despite involving underlyingly distinct argument alignment.

Comparative Study of Throw Subtype in Motion Verbs Based on Dixon’s Theory in English and Buginese

This research focuses on Throw Subtype verbs in English and Buginese in investigating similarities and differences of motion verbs, and identifying them in the semantic aspect and grammatical construction. This research data, English data collected fromCorpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and Buginese data obtained fromfield research through observation process and interview, are analyzed with descriptive and qualitative analysis. The research results indicate (1) Thirteen Throw Subtype verbs in English: throw, chuck, fling, pour, spray, water, push, press, pull, jerk, drag, tug, and draw. Then, nineteen of those in Buginese: makkabeang, mademperrang, mangappeyang, maggampessang, mappalitta’, mappattama’, mattiri, mattuppa’, massimporo’, massirang, massorong, massogorang, mappagappo, mattenre’, marrui’, maddui’, mappasitta’, madduisang, and marenreng. In Buginese verbs, several verb types implies the same meaning in English verbs but in different usage. makkabeang, mademperrang, mangappeyang and maggampessang have a similar meaning with ‘throw’ verb. Next, mattiri and mattupa have the same meaning with ‘water’ verb. Then, massorong, massogorang, mappagapo have the similar meaning with ‘push’ verb All those verbs are categorized as transitive verb (2) The main differences of Throw subtypes in English and Buginese language can be seen fromclause structure. Clause structure of Buginese is similar to English where NP is followed by VP since all verbs are known as intransitive construction. However, it has six patterns-NP+VP, NP+VP+ADV,VP+NP, VP+NP+ADV, ADV+VP+ADV, NP(Ob)+VP+ADV. Regarding preposition, two prepositions in Buginese have similar meaning and difference usage such as ri/di, and ku which mean in.

The construction of English verb “send”: A cognitive linguistics study

This research is entitled “The Construction of English Verb “SEND”: A Cognitive Linguistic Study”. It is based on cognitive linguistic, because with cognitive linguistic it could be seen how exactly the construction of English verb “send” and how the construction could have that construction. The aims of the research are; 1) to analyze the construction of English verb “SEND” as a single verb; and 2) to analyze the Construction of English verb "SEND" as a phrasal verb. The data will be collected by using observation method and noting technique. Then, it will be analyzed by using distributional method with expansion, ellipsis, and immediate constituent division. All data that have been collected and analyzed will then be described by qualitative method. As a result, there would be two main outcome found in this research. First, the construction of English verb “send” in the form of single verb, those are English verb “send” as single verb in intransitive construction, transitive construction and ditransitive construction. Second, the construction of English verb “send” in the form of phrasal verb, those are English verb “send” as phrasal verb in intransitive construction, transitive construction, and ditransitive construction.

Oblique anticausatives: A morphosyntactic isogloss in Indo-European

AbstractThe goal of this article is to introduce to the field a particular subtype of valency-reducing strategies, referred to asoblique anticausativizationbelow. This subtype differs from more common and better known dependent-marking types, such as, for instance, the canonical anticausative. Instead, oblique anticausatives are characterized by the preservation of the object case of the transitive-causative alternant, hence the termoblique. This object case marker shows up with the subject of the corresponding intransitive construction. We document the existence of this alternation in seven branches of Indo-European, particularly in the North-Central region, but also sporadically in the South-Eastern parts of the Indo-European area. Ruling out alternative accounts of the relevant geographical distribution, such as borrowing and shared innovation, we argue for a morphosyntactic isogloss common for Germanic, Baltic, Slavic and Italic. This is paralleled by isolated enclaves found in other branches of Indo-European, such as Ancient Greek, Anatolian and Indo-Aryan. Altogether, the evidence speaks for the existence of oblique anticausativization in the proto-language, thus motivating a reconstruction of this alternation for the grammar of Proto-Indo-European.

"Issues and maize bread taste good when they're cool"

This paper is an analysis of the basic and extended meanings of temperature lexemes and the grammar of temperature expressions in Kambaata in comparison to related Highland East Cushitic languages of Ethiopia. Globally, Kambaata has a system of two opposing temperature values, ‘cold’ vs. ‘warm/hot’. The lexeme iib- ‘be(come) warm/hot’ contrasts with caal- ‘be(come) tactile cold’ in the tactile frame of temperature evaluation, while it contrasts with gid- ‘be(come) non-tactile cold’ in the domain of ambient (weather) and personal-feeling (inner) temperature. In addition to these central lexemes, Kambaata has a number of terms that are semantically more restricted, are less frequent and/or have an unequivocal positive or negative connotation, including, e.g., sigg- ‘be(come) comfortably cold or warm, cool’ and buss- ‘burn (tr.); be dangerously, excessively hot’. Irrespective of the temperature value, the expression of personal-feeling temperature is constructionally different from that of ambient temperature and tactile temperature; for the former a transitive, for the latter an intransitive construction is used. As for the extended uses of temperature terms, Kambaata maps warmth/heat onto freshness, busyness, and anger, and links burning heat to anger, spiciness and raging thirst. Unlike many other languages in the world, Kambaata does not relate warmth/heat to affection. Furthermore, Kambaata conceptualizes inactivity, ineptness and fear as tactile cold but the absence of emotional and physical pain as non-tactile cold. Coolness is linked metaphorically to calmness and absence of thirst. In the Highland East Cushitic branch of languages, ‘warm/hot’ is the most stable term, whereas six seemingly non-cognate roots are used for ‘tactile cold’ and/or ‘non-tactile cold'.

Особенности употребления активного залога в непереходных конструкциях в древнеармянском языке

Особенности употребления активного залога в непереходных конструкциях в древнеармянском языке

A Study into the Prototypicality of Chinese Labile Verbs

Trying to situate Chinese into the typology of labile verbs (verbs that may be used transitively or intransitively), this paper analyzes Chinese labile verbals under the framework of cognitive construction grammar. By exhaustively looking at labile verbals in a small corpus, it is found that as an isolating language in which causative (transitive use) or anticausative (intransitive use) is not morphologically marked, Chinese is particularly rich in labile verbals. After estimating how often several target verbals are used transitively and intransitively, two factors grounded in human cognition are revealed determining verbal lability in Chinese: change of state and spontaneity of the event. Change-of-state events give way to two competing profiling strategies, realized as a transitive construction and an intransitive construction, respectively. The degree and direction (transitive-dominated or intransitive-dominated) of verbal lability are sensitive to the likelihood of spontaneous occurrence of the event.

On the intransitive usage of transitive verbs in Tooro, a Bantu language of Western Uganda

AbstractIn some Bantu languages of western Uganda, we find an interesting construction in which typical transitive verbs such as “to cut (a tree),” “to bend (a wire),” “to smoke (meat),” “to tear (paper),” “to open (a door),” etc., are used intransitively, without any additional suffixes such as passive and neuter. I call this construction the syntactically intransitive construction of transitive verbs, and illustrate it with examples from Tooro, a Bantu language of western Uganda. However, two important restrictions apply regarding the use of this construction. One is that among transitive verbs, only those causing a change of state that take human agents and inanimate objects may be used intransitively, with inanimate objects being promoted to the subject position. The second restriction is that this construction may only be used with the perfective ending -

Nick C. Ellis, Ute Römer, and Matthew Brook O’Donnell: Usage-Based Approaches to Language Acquisition and Processing: Cognitive and Corpus Investigations of Construction Grammar

This book, published in the Language Learning Monograph Series, is the result of a long-lasting collaboration between three researchers, Nick Ellis, Ute Romer, and Matthew Brook O’Donnell, who come from different—but complementary—backgrounds: cognitive psychology, corpus linguistics, and computer science. This combined expertise shines through in each of the 10 chapters which, taken together, provide a comprehensive account of the use, acquisition, and processing of Verb-Argument Constructions (VACs) in English from a usage-based, and more particularly Construction Grammar perspective. The main focus is on three VACs, namely, the Verb Locative, or intransitive motion construction (e.g. He ran into the room), the Verb Object Locative, or caused motion construction (e.g. She put the box under the bed), and the Verb Object Object, or ditransitive...

Linking Language and Events: Spatiotemporal Cues Drive Children’s Expectations About the Meanings of Novel Transitive Verbs

ABSTRACTHow do children map linguistic representations onto the conceptual structures that they encode? In the present studies, we provided 3–4-year-old children with minimal-pair scene contrasts in order to determine the effect of particular event properties on novel verb learning. Specifically, we tested whether spatiotemporal cues to causation also inform children’s interpretation of transitive verbs either with or without the causal/inchoative alternation (She broke the lamp/the lamp broke). In Experiment 1, we examined spatiotemporal continuity. Children saw scenes with puppets that approached a toy in a distinctive manner, and toys that lit up or played a sound. In the causal events, the puppet contacted the object, and activation was immediate. In the noncausal events, the puppet stopped short before reaching the object, and the effect occurred after a short pause (apparently spontaneously). Children expected novel verbs used in the inchoative transitive/intransitive alternation to refer to spatiotemporally intact causal interactions rather than to “gap” control scenes. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the temporal order of sub-events, holding spatial relationships constant, and provided evidence for only one verb frame (either transitive or intransitive). Children mapped transitive verbs to scenes where the agent’s action closely preceded the activation of the toy over scenes in which the timing of the two events was switched, but did not do so when they heard an intransitive construction. These studies reveal that children’s expectations about transitive verbs are at least partly driven by their nonlinguistic understanding of causal events: children expect transitive syntax to refer to scenes where the agent’s action is a plausible cause of the outcome. These findings open a wide avenue for exploration into the relationship between children’s linguistic knowledge and their nonlinguistic understanding of events.

The integration of contact by impact verbs into the intransitive motion construction

The present investigation will analyze the lexical-constructional integration of contact by impact verbs (transitive by origin) into the intransitive-motion construction. Departing from the classical works by Levin (1993), Goldberg (1995) and Faber and Mairal (1999) on contact by impact verbs, I will propose a new taxonomy that overcomes the weaknesses of previous classifications and discuss the constructional use of these verbs in real language data. Finally, I will explain the compatibility of such verbs with the intransitive-motion construction following the explanatory tools provided by the Lexical Constructional Model (Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal, 2008a, 2008b, 2011). The main conclusions that derive from this study are that most contact-by-impact verbs are compatible with the intransitive-motion construction, this integration being possible by applying different high-level metaphors and metonymies and that all contact-by-impact verbs that are related to sound (batter, bump, crack,…) are licensed into the intransitive-motion construction thanks to the use of the high-level metonymy RESULT FOR ACTION, in which the resulting sound is taken as the action performed by the subject.

Investigating the transitive and intransitive constructions in English and Japanese

Previous research has suggested that languages differ in terms of how much prominence is given to the agent. Namely, English prefers to give prominence to a human agent, whereas Japanese prefers to suppress the human agent and express events as if they happen spontaneously (e.g., Ikegami 1981). By using a Japanese novel and its English translation as a parallel corpus, this paper shows quantitatively that Japanese uses more intransitive constructions than English. Using Hopper & Thompson’s (1980) parameters to measure semantic transitivity, this paper also shows that the difference in intransitive constructions was only observed in low semantic transitivity events, whereas both languages exhibit similar trends for high semantic transitivity events. An analysis under the framework of Construction Grammar suggests that the Japanese intransitive construction covers a space in a semantic map which would be occupied by the transitive and adjectival constructions in English.

Transitive NEED Does Not Imply Transitive HAVE: Response to Harves and Kayne 2012

Transitive NEED Does Not Imply Transitive HAVE: Response to Harves and Kayne 2012

Revisiting Chinese-speaking children's understanding of argument structure

A causative verb is likely to appear in a sentence with two noun arguments, whereas a noncausative verb tends to appear in a sentence with a single argument. The present research investigates from what point children learning Chinese begin to show this knowledge of argument structure. Two-, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children were tested using a forced-choice pointing task. The results showed that Chinese-speaking children aged 2 years could associate a transitive construction with a causative event, whereas they were not able to map an intransitive construction to a noncausative event even after reaching 5 years of age. The reason why Chinese children have such difficulty in learning knowledge of intransitive construction is discussed, focusing on (a) the semantic properties of certain intransitive verbs, which have been found not only in Chinese but also in other languages, and (b) the ellipsis of arguments, which is characteristic of Chinese.

The retreat from overgeneralization in child language acquisition: word learning, morphology, and verb argument structure.

This review investigates empirical evidence for different theoretical proposals regarding the retreat from overgeneralization errors in three domains: word learning (e.g., *doggie to refer to all animals), morphology [e.g., *spyer, *cooker (one who spies/cooks), *unhate, *unsqueeze, *sitted; *drawed], and verb argument structure [e.g., *Don't giggle me (c.f. Don't make me giggle); *Don't say me that (c.f. Don't say that to me)]. The evidence reviewed provides support for three proposals. First, in support of the pre-emption hypothesis, the acquisition of competing forms that express the desired meaning (e.g., spy for *spyer, sat for *sitted, and Don't make me giggle for *Don't giggle me) appears to block errors. Second, in support of the entrenchment hypothesis, repeated occurrence of particular items in particular constructions (e.g., giggle in the intransitive construction) appears to contribute to an ever strengthening probabilistic inference that non-attested uses (e.g., *Don't giggle me) are ungrammatical for adult speakers. That is, both the rated acceptability and production probability of particular errors decline with increasing frequency of pre-empting and entrenching forms in the input. Third, learners appear to acquire semantic and morphophonological constraints on particular constructions, conceptualized as properties of slots in constructions [e.g., the (VERB) slot in the morphological un-(VERB) construction or the transitive-causative (SUBJECT) (VERB) (OBJECT) argument-structure construction]. Errors occur as children acquire the fine-grained semantic and morphophonological properties of particular items and construction slots, and so become increasingly reluctant to use items in slots with which they are incompatible. Findings also suggest some role for adult feedback and conventionality; the principle that, for many given meanings, there is a conventional form that is used by all members of the speech community. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:47-62. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1207 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Everyday talk informs toddlers’ novel verb generalizations

This study explores the effects of discourse context on a child’s ability to generalize transitively trained novel verbs in an experimental setting and the ability to diversely use intransitive constructions in everyday talk. Two- and three-year-olds participated in novel verb training and play sessions. An effect of discourse context was found; novel verbs were used most often in training, rather than elicitation. Thirty percent of the children generalized a transitively trained novel verb to an intransitive construction. The generalizing children differed from non-generalizers in the proportion with which they used familiar intransitive verbs diversely during play. Thus, the process through which children come to generalize verbs may be influenced by their everyday verb usage on a construction by construction basis.

On the Reflexive-Antipassive Polysemy: Typological Convergence from Unrelated Languages

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:This paper deals with the antipassive construction that has raised considerable interest in the syntactic description of ergative languages over the last few decades (Dixon 1979). Often defined on structural grounds, antipassive is said to be a derived intransitive construction with a two-place predicate, the object argument of which is either suppressed or realized as an oblique (Polinsky 2005). Tradition-ally, the antipassive is related to the ergative system. Although some authors insist on the link between the antipassive and ergativity (Dixon 1979, Cooreman 1993), certain typologically-oriented publications extend discussions on antipassive phenomena to accusative languages (Heath 1976, Polinsky 2005, Creissels 2006).

Il leoncino fra le braccia (Aesch. Ag. 723)

At Aesch. Ag. 723 the main difficulty of the transmitted text πολέα δ’ ἕσχ’ ἐν α’γκάλαις is not aroused by the intransitive construction of ἔχειν, which finds parallels both in earlier poetry and in tragic authors, but, as Rauchenstein, Fraenkel and others have pointed out, by the tense of the verb, which cannot express the durative aspect of the action (the lion’s cub staying in the arms of the inhabitants of the house). Many editors have accepted Casaubon’s conjecture ἔσκ’, or Dorat’s less persuasive rearrangement of the phrase πολέα δ’ ἔσχ’ … φαιδρωπὸν … σαίνοντα γαστρὸς α’νάγκαις. It is possible however to rescue at least partially the transmitted verb in the requested imperfect tense by writing πολέα δ’ εἶχ’ ἐν α’γκάλαις.

A case of impaired verbalization but preserved gesticulation of motion events

In most cultures, most of the time, when people talk they gesture. We took advantage of a rare opportunity to explore the relation between the verbalization and gesticulation of motion events by studying Marcel, an English speaker with a unilateral left-hemisphere lesion affecting frontal, parietal, and temporal sectors of the perisylvian cortex. Marcel has intact semantic knowledge of the three major classes of words that are commonly used in English descriptions of motion events—specifically, concrete nouns, action verbs, and spatial prepositions—as well as intact syntactic knowledge of how these word classes are typically combined in the intransitive motion construction (e.g., The ball rolled down the hill). However, his ability to retrieve the lexical-phonological structures of these words is severely impaired. Despite this profound anomia, he is still remarkably skilled at producing iconic manual depictions of motion events, as demonstrated in two experiments involving spontaneous gestures and one experiment involving elicited gestures. Moreover, the structural characteristics of Marcel's gestures are clearly sensitive to the idiosyncratic meanings of English verbs and prepositions, and they may also be sensitive to the way motion events are syntactically packaged in the intransitive motion construction. These findings improve our understanding of how some brain-damaged individuals with severe aphasia but without manual apraxia can successfully employ gesture to augment the semantic content of their speech.

Logical polysemy and variable verb valency

This paper is a discussion of how James Pustejovsky [Pustejovsky, James, 1995. The Generative Lexicon. MIT Press, Cambridge MA; Pustejovsky, James, 1998a. The semantics of lexical underspecification. Folia Linguistica 32 (3), 323–348] deals with the alleged lexical polysemy of words in semantically and structurally related syntactic contexts. Polysemy is at the centre of current semantic research, in both the cognitive and the generative paradigms. In Section 1 I discuss some similarities and differences between both paradigms and draw attention to a number of as yet unsolved problems. In particular I examine a seeming paradox in Pustejovsky’s theory of ‘qualia-structures’ which are postulated for lexical items. On the one hand Pustejovsky’s theory is based on the claim that polysemy is fundamental to meanings and that linguistic expressions change their semantic features (meanings) in context; on the other hand, the theory of ‘qualia-structures’ seems to favour a monosemy approach. I argue that in Pustejovsky’s account syntagmatically observable polysemy (meaning variation) is projected into the ‘qualia-structures’ of words and that this account is to be distinguished from a monosemy approach based on paradigmatic meaning oppositions between lexical items. In Section 2 special attention is paid to the semantics of verbs with causative/intransitive alternation, e.g. break, which have variable valency and occur in complementary argument structures exemplified by clauses like John broke the bottle and The bottle broke. In particular, the claim that propositions with the intransitive construction (‘unaccusative’) are ‘semantically entailed’ in propositions with the transitive one is called into question. I argue that this claim does not bear on the semantic function (linguistic meaning proper) of the verb or argument structure but rather on different events or states of affairs to which speakers can refer using this kind of verbs with variable valency. It is shown that a logical–referential treatment is incompatible with a coherent concept of ‘semantic entailment’. Taken in its linguistic sense, this concept implies that argument structures with fewer arguments (and, as a consequence, a simpler lexical structure) semantically entail more elaborate argument structures, rather than the other way around. Moreover, evidence is presented that ‘semantic entailment’ does not necessarily imply polysemy but should be regarded as an instance of neutralization.