Transitive Verbs Research Articles

The Subcategorization of Derived Verbs in Kifipa

This paper aims at investigating Subcategorizations of derived verbs in Kifipa. Kifipa is a Bantu language spoken in south-west Tanzania by the people denoted to as Wafipa. Wafipa live in a bigger area between Lake Rukwa and Lake Tanganyika. Currently, the area is located in Rukwa region. Verbs are subcategorized differently in different languages. In isolating languages, verb subcategorization is a syntactic study while in Bantu languages verb subcategorization is a morphosyntactic study. In some languages derivation does not affect the subcategorization of verbs except passive while in other languages especially Bantu, derivation (verb extension) alters the subcategorization of basic verbs. The paper focuses on three morpho-syntactic aspects of derived verbs in Kifipa. The paper is guided by the theory known as Government and Binding theory and Burzio’s Generalization Principle in particular. Burzio’s generalization is the work of a linguist known as Luigi Burzio in 1986. Burzio's generalization deals with the organization of verb harmony, and how these verbs behave towards their arguments. In his theory, Burzio came up with a general classification of verbs. Qualitative approach and explanatory research design were employed in the analysis and presentation of data. A sample of six respondents from Matai and Singiwe villages were selected using snowball sampling technique on the basis of age and language ability. Data were collected through sentence questionnaires, grammaticality judgements and extraction from written materials. The findings reveal that Kifipa has three subcategories of derived verbs including the verbs which allow only a single argument, the verbs which allow the occurrence of two or three arguments and lastly the super transitive verbs which allow the occurrence of more than three arguments which is a result of the co-occurrence of two or more extension suffixes. Extension affixes in Kifipa affects the subcategory as they increase the number of arguments these extensions are applicative and causative verb extensions. On the other hand, extensions such as passive, reciprocal, stative and reflexive decrease the number of arguments while extension such as intensive does not affect the arguments of the verb.

Comparative Analysis of the Reflexive Forms of Russian and Spanish Transitive Verbs in the Expression of Types of Collateral Semantics

Comparative Analysis of the Reflexive Forms of Russian and Spanish Transitive Verbs in the Expression of Types of Collateral Semantics

상고 한어 재귀사 自의 품사 및 탄생 과정— 통시적⋅언어 유형학적 고찰을 바탕으로

This paper discusses the problem of the part of speech of zi 自 in Old Chinese and illustrates its grammaticalization path. The part of speech of 自 in Old Chinese has been controversial. This paper argues that 自 is a reflexive adverb, following Pulleyblank (1995), 楊伯峻·何樂 士 (2001), and others. There are two bases for this argument. Firstly, 自 suggests coreferentiality between the agent and the patient, which entails that 自 is a reflexive. Secondly, 自 scarcely appears in subject, object, or adnominal position. Instead, it almost always appears preceding the verb, which shows that 自 is an adverb. From a historical perspective, this paper explains the origin and the grammaticalization path of 自 by analyzing its occurrences in the Oracle-Bone Inscriptions, the Bronze Inscriptions, The Book of Documents, The Book of Odes, Zuo’s Commentary, and The Analects. The original meaning of 自 is ‘nose’(=鼻); it later expanded into ‘self.’ The ‘self’ meaning developed into an emphatic reflexive (meaning an action coming out from oneself) and further developed into a reflexive adverb (meaning ‘selfwisely’). This study shows the development of 自 from an emphatic reflexive into a reflexive adverb by analyzing (i) the sentence structures in which 自 appears and (ii) the verbs co-occurring with 自. While an emphatic reflexive 自 is followed by an intransitive verb or a transitive with or without an object, a reflexive adverb 自 can only be followed by a transitive verb with no object. The reflexive adverb 自 first started to co-occur with verbs of injury such as 殺 ‘to kill,’ 刖 ‘to cut off the foot,’ 刃 ‘to stab,’ 剄 ‘to behead,’ and so on. It is well attested cross-linguistically that words meaning ‘body’ or body parts are frequently grammaticalized into reflexives, in some cases via an intermediate stage of an emphatic reflexive. The grammaticalization of 自 from ‘nose’ (later expanded into ‘self’) to a reflexive adverb via an emphatic reflexive is in concordance with such a tendency.

Implicit Arguments in Ugandan English

In standard British/American English, some transitive verbs, which are ontologically specified for objects, may be used with the objects not overtly expressed (for example, leave), while other transitive verbs do not permit this syntactic behavior (for example, vacate). The former have been referred to as verbs that allow implicit arguments. This study shows that while verbs such as vacate do not ideally allow implicit arguments in standard British/American English, this is permitted in Ugandan English (a non-native variety), thereby highlighting structural asymmetries between British/American English and Ugandan English, owing mainly to substrate influence and analogization. The current study highlights those structural asymmetries and ultimately uncovers some characteristic features in the structural nativization process of English in Uganda, thereby contributing to the growing larger discourse meant to fill the gaps that had characterized World Englishes scholarship, where thorough delineations of Ugandan English have been virtually absent.

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.

On the interplay between tense marking, aspect and temporal continuity in Udora Komi

The Udora dialect of Zyrian Komi lacks the morphological opposition between the present and future tenses that is found in other Komi dialects and the written standard. The morphemes corresponding to these tenses are, however, found in this dialect, with individual verbs showing a strong tendency to choose one of the two. This study shows that the two morphemes are not in free variation but rather carry various grammatical meanings, and that the variants are strongly connected to the lexical aspect of individual verbs. Due to the rigidity of the system, the authors refer to the variants here as conjugation types. The -as- conjugation type, which corresponds to the Standard Komi future marker, occurs with all transitive verbs and a majority of intransitive verbs. However, the study also identifies a group of intransitive verbs occurring with the conjugation type -e̮-. The verbs in the latter group can be analysed as temporally continuous. Additionally, there are other subgroupings that can be postulated, including verbs that describe involuntary actions. The system interacts in a predictable manner with Komi derivational morphology. The study also corroborates the previously proposed historical connection between this characteristic of verbal morphology in the Udora dialect and Old Komi. The authors suggest that the verbal morphology seen in these Komi varieties must predate the contemporary tense system. The study provides a new direction for analysing the development of the tense system in the Permic languages, as it is shown that the factors underlying the variation extend beyond transitivity. As a previously undescribed phenomenon, the study describes the use of the Udora conjugation types in narrative tense structuring and demonstrate parallels with Standard Komi.

Lexical Verbs in Verb-Noun Collocations: Empirical Evidence from a Malay ESL Learner Corpus

Previous studies have shown that verbs are indeed one of the essential lexical items that seem to dominate a text. At tertiary levels, learners are often presented with a list of verbs that are essential for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses such as academic writing. However, it is believed that the learning and teaching of these verbs goes far beyond the lists of EAP verbs. This is because knowledge of lexical verbs entails not only the knowledge of grammatical structures, but also the knowledge of semantic and syntactic structures. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how commonly used lexical verbs are used in learner writing in the perspectives of grammatical, semantic and syntactic features of verb-noun collocations. To achieve this, a corpus-based study using WordSmith Tools was employed on a learner corpus of Malay ESL learners to identify most-commonly used lexical verbs. These verbs were further given a linguistic analysis using a phraseological-based approach. The findings revealed that the use of transitive verbs led to several occurrences of verb-noun collocations and that the phraseological patterns of these verbs are bound by both lexical and grammatical patterns. This leads to the conclusion that the teaching of lexical verbs, specifically Verb-Noun collocations in academic writing should not only include the semantic elements, but also the syntactical elements of the verbs. It is then recommended that a lesson on lexical verbs should incorporate the teaching and learning of both lexis and grammar. Keywords: English for Academic Purpose; lexical verbs; phraseological-based approach; verb-noun collocations; learner corpus research

Emotive verbs of the Russian language in the semantic and grammatical aspect

The article is devoted to the consideration of the lexical-grammatical and semantic features of converting pairs of emotive verbs in the Russian language such as “To be angry - to anger, to worry - to excite, to be embarrassed - to embarrass, to be furious - to enrage”. These verbs form an opposition having a grammatical, derivational and semantic character. In terms of the semantic relationship, the transitive verb is more complex, since it contains “causation”, while the formal relationship, on the contrary, means greater complexity of the reflexive verb, which has a postfix “-Sya”.The constitutive semantic features of emotive verbs of the Russian language are “unintentional action”, “focus on the object” (for a transitive verb) and self-isolation (reflexive verb), the ability to describe an emotional state, emotional experience, emotional attitude.

Наблюдения върху синтактичната реализация на предикати за емоционални състояния

The object of the analysis in the following paper are sentences with verbs for emotions (psychological verbs, Experiencer verbs) in the modern Bulgarian language. The main goal is to present the syntactic realization of arguments to the verb obicham (to love) as representative of the syntactic features of the verbs for positive emotions. The selective restrictions for the realization of the arguments are determined by lexical semantics and thematic structure of the predicates. For psychological verbs, the subject is marked with the thematic role Experiencer, and the complements are either Theme (Object of emotion) or Stimulus. The external complement of the transitive verb obicham (to love) is marked as Theme and represents object – specific, generic, as well as propositional one, to which the emotional relationship is directed. Observations show that in the subject position, in addition to nouns denoting animate objects, names of specific inanimate or abstract objects can also be used. Da-clauses are the main means for the realization of object complements to the verb obicham. In certain contexts, subordinate clauses with free relatives can also be used.

The acquisition of argument structures of intransitive and transitive verbs in Japanese: The role of parental input

The present study investigated the role of morphosyntactic information in the acquisition of transitive and intransitive verb argument structures (VAS) in the Japanese language, which allows massive omissions of arguments and case markers. In particular, we investigated how the ‘variation sets’ proposed by Küntay and Slobin work in Japanese. Longitudinal interaction data from three Japanese-speaking mother–child pairs were collected at five different times between the ages of 0;10 and 3;01. Children’s acquisition of VAS and mothers’ use of verbs were examined, including morphologically related verbs in a variety of sentence frames with null and overt arguments. The results indicate that all three mothers showed an increase in overt arguments in different syntactic roles as well as lexical given arguments around the time that children started uttering words. However, the use of a variety of sentence frames with null and overt arguments was not uniform among the mothers, and such individual differences were related to the acquisition of VAS among children. These findings support the role of ‘variation sets’ in the acquisition of VAS in Japanese and suggest that the availability of morphosyntactic information in the input helps children to reconstruct VAS.

A complexity hierarchy-based solution to the clausal subject puzzle in Turkish

This paper presents a novel analysis of subordinate clause structure in Turkish, focusing on subordinations formed by the following three suffixes: the infinitival -mA(K) with tenseless and (ir)realis usages, and -DIK/ -(y)ACAK with a (non)future temporal specification. We present a classification aligning each form on the Implicational Complementation Hierarchy (ICH) proposed in Wurmbrand and Lohninger (2020), which provides a solution for the subject puzzle observed with these clauses: only infinitival -mA(K) clauses with their (ir)realis use are compatible with being the subject of a transitive verb. We propose that (ir)realis infinitival clauses belong to the situation class in the ICH, and that this middle class is of the ideal semantic complexity and syntactic size for a clausal subject in Turkish.

Idiomatic Expressions Analysis in Joker Movie

This research aims to find out the types of idiomatic expressions and to identify the patterns of idiomatic expressions in the Joker movie. This research employed a descriptive qualitative method. In collecting the data, this research used a classification form, documentation, and monolingual dictionaries. The result showed that there were 4 types of idiomatic expressions found in the Joker movie; proverbs, clichés, fixed statements, and slang. The other types of idiomatic expressions such as simile, binomial, and other language were absent from the Joker movie. Moreover, the researcher identified the patterns of the idiomatic expressions in the Joker movie were; noun phrases, transitive verb phrases, verbal phrases, prepositional phrases, pair of words, and sentence pattern. The other patterns of idiomatic expressions such as be + prepositional phrases and alliterative comparison were not consisted in the Joker movie.

Neural processing of nouns and verbs in spontaneous speech of patients with schizophrenia

Previous fMRI-studies investigating the production of nouns and verbs in healthy participants reported predominantly activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) for both classes of words with increased neural responses for verbs. To date, comparable imaging data for spontaneous speech in patients with schizophrenia is missing. These results are novel and may contribute to understand the neural basis of noun and verb production in a "natural" environment. Fifteen patients with schizophrenia and fifteen healthy control participants described pictures for one minute each while BOLD signal changes were measured with fMRI. In an event-related design, activations related to noun and verb production were extracted in the imaging analysis. Imaging results revealed increased activation for nouns and decreased activation for verbs in the left IFG in the patients. A post-hoc analysis revealed that patients produced significantly more transitive verbs which were negatively associated with activation in the left IFG. We conclude that a subtle linguistic processing deficit in schizophrenia may lead to an increased use of transitive as compared to intransitive verbs in connected speech and to a deviant pattern of brain activation related to the processing of verbs.

Ditransitive Constructions in Zaza Language

Languages group verbs in different ways. Because of the ergative feature of Zazaki, it plays a big role whether the verbs are transitive or intransitive. Zaza Language introduces some pronouns to distinguish double-transitive verbs from transitive and intransitive verbs. In some linguistic works, the terms transitive and ergative are used synonymously. This article aims to scrutinize ditransitive constructions in the Zaza language, which has some interesting syntactic elements in these structures. They are mostly pronouns in combination with directions. Several pronouns replace indirect object. On the one hand, the goal of this study is to find out the functions of these pronouns. The semantic content of these pronouns decides which pronouns may appear in a specific position. They can appear with or without directions. Only the pronouns such as cı can alone replace a NP, the other ones need a direction for this replacing. On the other hand, this study discusses the morphosyntactic and semantic realizations in ditransitive constructions. While these pronouns do not syntactically follow the same word order, they can semantically be classified into two groups.

The analysis of phrasal verbs found in blood diamond movie by edward zwick

This study investigated the types of phrasal verbs encountered in a movie entitled Blood Diamond. The problems of this study is what types of phrasal verb are found in the movie entitled Blood Diamond?. This study employed descriptive and qualitative method to provide a well-organized description regarding the problems being identified. The data of this study were obtained by observation method through four stages. Firstly, watching the Blood Diamond movie. Secondly, finding and taking notes the phrasal verb spoken by the characters in the movie Blood Diamond. Reading the online movie script and finally the writer categorized the types of data based on the theory proposed by McCarthy & O’Dell (2007:8). There were two types of phrasal verb encountered namely transitive and intransitive phrasal verb, in which transitive phrasal verb can be specialized into separable or non-separable transitive phrasal verb. The result of the study demonstrated that there are 8 data of phrasal verbs discovered in the movie Blood Diamond consisting 4 transitive phrasal verbs and 4 intransitive phrasal verbs.

Motor and auditory priming in a lexical decision task with action and sound verbs

According to embodied cognition theories, concepts are represented in sensory and motor brain systems. These sensory-motor representations can give rise to priming effects. Action verbs (e.g., to push) presumably have a higher association with motor features, and sound verbs (e.g., to buzz) with auditory features. This study assesses whether motor and auditory primes differentially influence the lexical decision of action and sound verbs. Seventy-five healthy Russian-speaking adults participated in the experiment. An online lexical decision task with cross-modal priming was administered. Participants were presented with meaningless primes such as a video clip of a moving hand (motor prime), a bike bell sound (auditory prime), or a static video clip (neutral prime). Then they saw a verb (an action verb, a sound verb, or a pseudoverb) and had to report whether or not it was a real word by pressing a button on the keyboard. Linear mixed effect models indicated no effect of the prime type on response accuracy or speed for any verb type. However, intransitive verbs elicited less accurate responses than transitive and optional-transitive verbs overall, regardless of the prime type. Moreover, participants responded slower for pseudoverbs than for real verbs. The results do not suggest differential category specific effects for action- and soundrelated verbs in a lexical decision task. However, the results for intransitive verbs support the facilitation through complexity hypothesis. Our findings do not support embodied cognition theories, but await further replication. Recommendations and future directions are discussed.

Inflexive Marker and Morphophonological Processes in the Lamalera Dialect of Lamaholot Language (LDLL)

Inflection is a universal linguistic phenomenon. The phenomenon of inflection occurs in every language according to each language system. The language system of each language greatly determines the peculiarities of the language inflection. Inflection in a language that is agglutinative is different from that in a language that has a synthetic, tonal and isolating system. The treatment of each language is different for this case of inflection. Lamalera Dialect of Lamaholot Language (LDLL) also shows inflection. Inflection in LDLL is different from inflection in other languages ​​because of the language system, especially the LDLL sound system. LDLL is not characterized by agglutinative, nor synthetic, tonal nor isolating morphology. What is the strategy for inflection in LDLL? The result of the study shows that in LDLL, inflection is expressed clitically on the verb. These clitics are cross-referenced by the verbs. There are two types of cross-reference clitics, namely cross-referencing proclitics and enclitics. Proclitic cross-referencing applies to both transitive and intransitive root verbs. This form of cross-referencing pronouns is both proclitic and enclitic, and morphophonological changes actually occur. This process cannot be avoided because morphophonological processes actually occur due to merging of the morpheme with another morpheme. In this case the clitic is considered as bound morpheme.

The syntactic status of noun incorporation in the tenetehára language (Tupi-Guarani family)

This paper aims at proposing a theoretical analysis that explains the noun incorporation process in the Tenetehára language (Tupi-Guarani). Thus, we attempt to answer the question: based on the assumptions of the Minimalist Program (cf. Chomsky, 1993, 1995), what is the formal feature responsible for motivating noun incorporation in Tenetehára? We consider two types of noun incorporation in the language under analysis, namely: (i) transitive predicates which become formally intransitive verbs as the internal argument is incorporated; and (ii) in the instances of possessive structures in internal argument positions of intransitive and transitive verbs, verbal valence is preserved, since only the possessee noun is incorporated. As for the syntax of noun incorporations, based on Baker (1988), we lay the foundation for further investigation about this morphosyntactic phenomenon within a minimalist approach (cf. Chomsky 1993, 1995). In summary, we propose that, in the Tenetehára language, the driving force responsible for the incorporation of the noun into the head of a vP is the [+non-individuated] formal feature.

ВСИЧКО Е НАРЕД С ГЛАГОЛА (ИНОВАЦИОННИТЕ ПРОЦЕСИ ТРАНЗИТИВАЦИЯ И ДЕРЕФЛЕКТИВАЦИЯ С ЦЕЛ ПРИПИСВАНЕ НА КАУЗАТИВНОСТ) / EVERYTHING IS FINE WITH THE VERB (INNOVATION PROCESSES OF TRANSITIVIZATION AND DEREFLEXIVIZATION AS A MEANS OF ATTRIBUTING CAUSATIVITY)

The paper presents a summary of the observations on the tranisitivization and dereflexivization of Bulgarian verbs as a means of attributing causativity. The majority of the newly formed verbs that we analyze are causative while others may, under certain conditions and in particular sentences, exemplify the causative rule. The lability of morphological identification regarding the transitivity – intransitivity distinction is the reason to examine the excerpted verbs as being either A- or Р-labile. The following tendency can be observed: P-lability has to do with causativity, while A-labile verbs are not-causative. In such cases the subject does not undergo changes neither in their intransitive nor in their transitive use. With P-labile verbs, the subject of the intransitive verb becomes the object of the transitive verb. There are some ambiva-lent verbs, such as minavam (pass), premina (pass over), svetna (light up), spomagam (facilitate), stigna (reach), treniram (train). Although the second group contains 40 causatives and the third group has 3 verbs, the lability procedure is not applicable because of the difference between the reflexive with the se- (се) marker and the transitive verb, i.e. the mismatch in form also means non-lability. The examples in the third group can also be viewed as the absolute use of the transitive verb meaning. The changes in the verbs indicate a change in the way contemporary Bulgarians think – the causative verbs serve as an expression of an active position, while the interplay between transitive and intransitive and/or reflexive and non-reflexive verbs has mostly pragmatic purposes, such as achieving a certain communicative effect, attractiveness, informality. Keywords: labile verbs, A-lability, P-lability, the lexico-grammatical category of transitivity ‒ intransitivity, causativity, Bulgarian language

PASSIVE VOICE AS A MEANS OF MARKING INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN MANSI: DATA FROM THE UPPER LOZVA DIALECT

This article is aimed at investigating the passive voice as one of the means of marking information structure. The data we use come from our own fieldwork among the Upper Lozva Mansi in 2017—2019 conducted in villages of Ushma and Treskolje of the Ivdel district of the Sverdlovsk oblast, Russian Federation. The data gathered during field trips was assembled into a small corpus of the Northern Mansi language, and we extracted all examples of passive voice found in this corpus. In the article, we briefly summarize the views of our predecessors on the role of the passive voice in Ob-Ugric languages and afterwards we describe the general outline of information structure in Mansi by briefly depicting the use of subject and object conjugations, the passive voice and case marking. We separately analyze the passive voice constructions formed from intransitive, transitive and bitransitive verbs. We conclude that passive voice is, as stated in previous studies, used for promoting the most topical constituent to the subject position. However, we also suppose that there are some other factors that contribute to the choice of voice in Mansi, e. g. animacy and referential properties of the constituent in question. We describe cases in which the most animate or the most definite (and not the most topical) constituent is being promoted to the subject position. We also suppose that not only these factors may separately affect the choice of voice, but also that the sum of these parameters might be crucial. We suggest that it is necessary to create a formal model which would include all the above-mentioned parameters and adequately describe the choice of voice in Mansi and in Ob-Ugric.