Transitivity (grammatical category)
Encyclopedia
In linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

, transitivity is a property of verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...

s that relates to whether a verb can take direct objects and how many such objects a verb can take. It is closely related to valency
Valency (linguistics)
In linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the number of arguments controlled by a verbal predicate. It is related, though not identical, to verb transitivity, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate...

, which considers other verb argument
Verb argument
In linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntactic relationship with the verb in a clause. In English, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object....

s in addition to direct objects.

Traditional grammar makes a binary distinction between intransitive verb
Intransitive verb
In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb that has no object. This differs from a transitive verb, which takes one or more objects. Both classes of verb are related to the concept of the transitivity of a verb....

s
that cannot take a direct object (such as fall or sit in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

) and transitive verb
Transitive verb
In syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more objects. The term is used to contrast intransitive verbs, which do not have objects.-Examples:Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs:...

s
that take one direct object (such as throw, injure, kiss in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

). In practice, many languages (including English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

) interpret the category more flexibly, allowing: ditransitive verb
Ditransitive verb
In grammar, a ditransitive verb is a verb which takes a subject and two objects which refer to a recipient and a theme. According to certain linguistics considerations, these objects may be called direct and indirect, or primary and secondary...

s, verbs that have two objects; or even ambitransitive verb
Ambitransitive verb
An ambitransitive verb is a verb that can be used both as intransitive or as transitive without requiring a morphological change. That is, the same verb form may or may not require a direct object. English has a large number of ambitransitive verbs; examples include read, break, and understand An...

s, verbs that can be used as both a transitive verb
Transitive verb
In syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more objects. The term is used to contrast intransitive verbs, which do not have objects.-Examples:Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs:...

 and an intransitive verb
Intransitive verb
In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb that has no object. This differs from a transitive verb, which takes one or more objects. Both classes of verb are related to the concept of the transitivity of a verb....

. Further, some verbs may be idiomatically transitive, while, technically, intransitive. This may be observed in the verb walk in the idiomatic expression To walk the dog.

In functional grammar
Functional grammar
Functional theories of grammar include a range of functionally based approaches to linguistics, the scientific study of language. The grammar model developed by Simon Dik bears this qualification in its name, functional grammar, as does Michael Halliday's systemic functional grammar.Role and...

, transitivity is considered to be a continuum rather than a binary category as in traditional grammar. The "continuum" view takes a more semantic
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....

 approach. One way it does this is by taking into account the degree to which an action affects its object (so that the verb see is described as having "lower transitivity" than the verb kill).

Formal analysis

Many languages, such as Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....

, mark transitivity through morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...

; transitive verbs and intransitive verbs behave in distinctive ways. In languages with polypersonal agreement
Polypersonal agreement
In linguistics, polypersonal agreement or polypersonalism is the agreement of a verb with more than one of its arguments...

, an intransitive verb will agree
Agreement (linguistics)
In languages, agreement or concord is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates....

 with its subject only, while a transitive verb will agree with both subject and direct object.

In other languages the distinction is based on syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

. It is possible to identify an intransitive verb in English, for example, by attempting to supply it with an appropriate direct object:
  • He kissed her hand - transitive verb.
  • She injured him - transitive verb.
  • What did you throw? - transitive verb.


By contrast, an intransitive verb coupled with a direct object will result in an ungrammatical
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...

 utterance:
  • *What did you fall?
  • *I sat a chair.


Conversely (at least in a traditional analysis), using a transitive verb in English without a direct object will result in an incomplete sentence:
  • I kissed (. . .)
  • You injured (. . .)
  • Where is she now? *She's injuring.


English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 is unusually lax by Indo-European
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...

 standards in its rules on transitivity; what may appear to be a transitive verb can be used as an intransitive verb, and vice versa.
Eat and read and many other verbs can be used either transitively or intransitively. Often there is a semantic
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....

 difference between the intransitive and transitive forms of a verb:
the water is boiling versus I boiled the water; the grapes grew versus I grew the grapes. In these examples, the role of the subject differs between intransitive and transitive verbs.

Even though an intransitive verb may not take a
direct object, it often may take an appropriate indirect object:
  • I laughed at him.


What are considered to be intransitive verbs can also take cognate object
Cognate object
In linguistics, a cognate object is a verb's object that is etymologically related to the verb. More specifically, the verb is one that is ordinarily intransitive , and the cognate object is simply the verb's noun form. For example, in the sentence He slept a troubled sleep, sleep is the cognate...

s -where the object is considered integral to the action, for example I slept an hour.

Languages that express transitivity through morphology

The following languages of the below language families
Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...

 (or hypothetical language families) have this feature:

In the Uralic
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...

 language family:
  • Mordvinic languages
    Mordvinic languages
    The Mordvinic languages, alternatively Mordvin languages, or Mordvinian languages, are a subgroup of the Uralic languages, comprising the closely related Erzya language and Moksha language.Previously considered a single "Mordvin language",...

  • The three Ugric languages
    Ugric languages
    Ugric or Ugrian languages are a branch of the Uralic language family. The term derives from Yugra, a region in north-central Asia.They include three languages: Hungarian , Khanty , and Mansi language...

  • Northern Samoyedic languages
    Samoyedic languages
    The Samoyedic languages are spoken on both sides of the Ural mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by approximately 30,000 speakers altogether....



In the Paleosiberian
Paleosiberian languages
Paleosiberian languages or Paleoasian languages is a term of convenience used in linguistics to classify a disparate group of languages spoken in some parts of north-eastern Siberia and some parts of Russian Far East...

 hypothetical language family:
  • Languages of both branches of the Eskimo–Aleut family; for details from the Eskimo
    Eskimo
    Eskimos or Inuit–Yupik peoples are indigenous peoples who have traditionally inhabited the circumpolar region from eastern Siberia , across Alaska , Canada, and Greenland....

     branch, see e.g. Sireniki, Kalaallisut
    Kalaallisut language
    Greenlandic is an Eskimo–Aleut language spoken by about 57,000 people in Greenland. It is closely related to the Inuit languages in Canada, such as Inuktitut...

  • Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages
    Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages
    The Chukotko-Kamchatkan or Chukchi–Kamchatkan languages are a language family of extreme northeastern Siberia. Its speakers are indigenous hunter-gatherers and reindeer-herders....

  • Yukaghir
    Yukaghir
    The Yukaghir, or Yukagirs , деткиль ) are a people in East Siberia, living in the basin of the Kolyma River.-Region:The Tundra Yukaghirs live in the Lower Kolyma region in the Sakha Republic; the Taiga Yukaghirs in the Upper Kolyma region in the Sakha Republic and in Srednekansky District of...

  • The Ket language
    Ket language
    The Ket language, formerly known as Yenisei Ostyak, is a Siberian language long thought to be an isolate, the sole surviving language of a Yeniseian language family...

     has a very sophisticated verbal inclination
    Inclination
    Inclination in general is the angle between a reference plane and another plane or axis of direction.-Orbits:The inclination is one of the six orbital parameters describing the shape and orientation of a celestial orbit...

     systems, referring (among others) also to the object in many ways, (see also polypersonal agreement
    Polypersonal agreement
    In linguistics, polypersonal agreement or polypersonalism is the agreement of a verb with more than one of its arguments...

    ).

Form-function mappings

Formal transitivity is associated with a variety of semantic functions across languages. Crosslinguistically, Hopper and Thompson (1980) have proposed to decompose the notion of transitivity into 10 formal and semantic features (some binary, some scalar); the features argued to be associated with high transitivity are summarized in the following well-known table:

1: PARTICIPANTS: 2 or more
2: KINESIS: action involved
3: ASPECT: telic
4: PUNCTUALITY:punctual
5: VOLITIONALITY: action is volitional
6: AFFIRMATION: utterance expressing action is affirmative
7: MODE: realis
8: AGENCY: A argument is high in potency
9: AFFECTEDNESS OF O argument: O totally affected
10: INDIVIDUATION OF O: O is highly individuated

Næss (2007) has argued at length for the following two points:
1) Though formally a broad category of phenomena, transitivity boils down to a way to maximally distinguish the two participants involved;
2) Major participants are describable in terms of the semantic features [±Volitional] [±Instigating] [±Affected] which makes them distinctive from each other. Different combinations of these binary values will yield different types of participants, which are then compatible or incompatible with different verbs. Individual languages may, of course, make more fine-grained distinctions. Næss' analysis is Types of participants discussed include:

-Volitional Undergoers (some Experiencer, Recipients, Beneficiaries): [+Vol], [-Inst], [+Aff]
ex. me in Spanish Me gusta. ['I like it.']
-Force: [-Vol], [+Inst], [-Aff]
ex. the tornado in The tornado broke my windows.
-Instrument: [-Vol], [+Inst], [+Aff]
ex. the hammer in The hammer broke the cup.

See also

  • Valency (linguistics)
    Valency (linguistics)
    In linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the number of arguments controlled by a verbal predicate. It is related, though not identical, to verb transitivity, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate...

  • Ergative–absolutive language
  • Verb argument
    Verb argument
    In linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntactic relationship with the verb in a clause. In English, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object....

  • Transitive verb
    Transitive verb
    In syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more objects. The term is used to contrast intransitive verbs, which do not have objects.-Examples:Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs:...

  • Intransitive verb
    Intransitive verb
    In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb that has no object. This differs from a transitive verb, which takes one or more objects. Both classes of verb are related to the concept of the transitivity of a verb....

  • Ambitransitive verb
    Ambitransitive verb
    An ambitransitive verb is a verb that can be used both as intransitive or as transitive without requiring a morphological change. That is, the same verb form may or may not require a direct object. English has a large number of ambitransitive verbs; examples include read, break, and understand An...

  • Impersonal verb
    Impersonal verb
    In linguistics, an impersonal verb is a verb that cannot take a true subject, because it does not represent an action, occurrence, or state-of-being of any specific person, place, or thing...

  • Unaccusative verb
    Unaccusative verb
    In linguistics, an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose subject is not a agent; that is, it does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action of the verb. Unaccusative verbs thus contrast with unergative verbs...

  • Differential Object Marking
    Differential object marking
    Differential object marking is a linguistic phenomenon that is present in more than 300 languages; the term was coined by Georg Bossong. In languages where DOM is active, direct objects are divided in two different classes, depending on different meanings, and, in most DOM languages, only one of...


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