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In
linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...
, transitivity is a property of
verb A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...
s that relates to whether a verb can take
object Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an ...
s and how many such objects a verb can take. It is closely related to valency, which considers other
verb argument In linguistics, an argument is an expression that helps complete the meaning of a predicate, the latter referring in this context to a main verb and its auxiliaries. In this regard, the '' complement'' is a closely related concept. Most predicates ...
s in addition to
direct object In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments. In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include b ...
s. The obligatory noun phrases and prepositional phrases determine how many arguments a predicate has. Obligatory elements are considered arguments while optional ones are never counted in the list of arguments. Traditional grammar makes a binary distinction between intransitive verbs, which cannot take a direct object (such as ''fall'' or ''sit'' in
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
), and
transitive verb A transitive verb is a verb that accepts one or more objects, for example, 'cleaned' in ''Donald cleaned the window''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not have objects, for example, 'panicked' in ''Donald panicked''. Transiti ...
s, which take a direct object (such as ''throw'', ''injure'', or ''kiss'' in English). In practice, many languages (including English) also have verbs that have two objects (
ditransitive verb In grammar, a ditransitive (or bitransitive) verb is a transitive verb whose contextual use corresponds to a subject and two objects which refer to a theme and a recipient. According to certain linguistics considerations, these objects may be ...
s) or even verbs that can be used as both a transitive verb and an intransitive verb (
ambitransitive verb An ambitransitive verb is a verb that is both intransitive and transitive.Dixon, R.M.W. & Aikhenvald, Alexendra Y. Changing Valency: Case Studies in Transitivity. Cambridge University Press. This verb may or may not require a direct object. Englis ...
s, for example ''She walked the dog'' and ''She walked with a dog''). In functional grammar, transitivity is considered to be a ''continuum'' rather than a binary category as in traditional grammar. The "continuum" view takes a more
semantic Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
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'').


History

The notion of transitivity, as well as other notions that today are the basics of linguistics, was first introduced by the
Stoics Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BCE. It is a philosophy of personal virtue ethics informed by its system of logic and its views on the natural world, asserting tha ...
and the
Peripatetic school The Peripatetic school was a school of philosophy in Ancient Greece. Its teachings derived from its founder, Aristotle (384–322 BC), and ''peripatetic'' is an adjective ascribed to his followers. The school dates from around 335 BC when Aristo ...
, but they probably referred to the whole sentence containing transitive or intransitive verbs, not just to the verb. The discovery of the Stoics was later used and developed by the philologists of the Alexandrian school and later grammarians.


Formal analysis

Many languages, such as Hungarian, mark transitivity through morphology; transitive verbs and intransitive verbs behave in distinctive ways. In languages with polypersonal agreement, an intransitive verb will agree 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 In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituenc ...
. It is possible to identify an intransitive verb in English, for example, by attempting to supply it with an appropriate direct object: *''He kissed ''—transitive verb. *''She injured ''—transitive verb. *'' did you throw?''—transitive verb. By contrast, an intransitive verb coupled with a direct object will result in an ungrammatical 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 usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
is unusually lax by comparison with other
Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, D ...
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 (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
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, known as
ergative verb In general linguistics, a labile verb (or ergative verb) is a verb that undergoes causative alternation; it can be used both transitively and intransitively, with the requirement that the direct object of its transitive use corresponds to the ...
s, 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 '' What are considered to be intransitive verbs can also take cognate objects, where the object is considered integral to the action, for example ''She slept a troubled sleep''.


Languages that express transitivity through morphology

The following languages of the below
language families A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in hi ...
(or hypothetical language families) have this feature: In the Uralo-Altaic language family: *
Mordvinic languages The Mordvinic languages, also known as the Mordvin, Mordovian or Mordvinian languages (russian: мордовские языки, ''mordovskiye yazyki''), are a subgroup of the Uralic languages, comprising the closely related Erzya language and Mok ...
* The three
Ugric languages The Ugric or Ugrian languages ( or ) are a proposed branch of the Uralic language family. The name Ugric is derived from Ugrians, an archaic exonym for the Magyars (Hungarians) and Yugra, a region in northwest Russia. Ugric includes three ...
* Northern
Samoyedic languages The Samoyedic () or Samoyed languages () are spoken around the Ural Mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by approximately 25,000 people altogether. They derive from a common ancestral language called Proto-Samoyedic, and form a branch of the Urali ...
*
Turkic languages The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turki ...
*
Mongolic languages The Mongolic languages are a language family spoken by the Mongolic peoples in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, North Asia and East Asia, mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas and in Kalmykia and Buryatia. The best-known member of this language ...
* Korean * Japanese In Indo-European (Indo-Aryan) language familyː *
Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...
-
Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
'' Hindustani) *
Punjabi Punjabi, or Panjabi, most often refers to: * Something of, from, or related to Punjab, a region in India and Pakistan * Punjabi language * Punjabi people * Punjabi dialects and languages Punjabi may also refer to: * Punjabi (horse), a British Th ...
*
Gujarati Gujarati may refer to: * something of, from, or related to Gujarat, a state of India * Gujarati people, the major ethnic group of Gujarat * Gujarati language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by them * Gujarati languages, the Western Indo-Aryan sub- ...
In the
Paleosiberian Paleosiberian (or Paleo-Siberian) languages or Paleoasian (Paleo-Asiatic) (from , "ancient") are several linguistic isolates and small families of languages spoken in parts of northeastern Siberia and the Russian Far East. They are not kn ...
hypothetical language family: * Languages of both branches of the Eskimo–Aleut family; for details from the
Eskimo Eskimo () is an exonym used to refer to two closely related Indigenous peoples: the Inuit (including the Alaska Native Iñupiat, the Greenlandic Inuit, and the Canadian Inuit) and the Yupik (or Yuit) of eastern Siberia and Alaska. A related ...
branch, see e.g.
Sireniki Sireniki (russian: Сиреники; Yupik: Сиӷинык, literally ''Mountain of Horns''; Chukchi: , ''Vutèèn''; Sirenik: ''Sigheneg'') is a village ('' selo'') in Providensky District of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, in the Far Eastern Fede ...
,
Kalaallisut Kalaallisut may refer to: * Greenlandic language * West Greenlandic West Greenlandic ( da, vestgrønlandsk), also known as Kalaallisut, is the primary language of Greenland and constitutes the Greenlandic language, spoken by the vast majority of ...
*
Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages The Chukotko-Kamchatkan or Chukchi–Kamchatkan languages are a language family of extreme northeastern Siberia. Its speakers traditionally were indigenous hunter-gatherers and reindeer-herders. Chukotko-Kamchatkan is endangered. The Kamchatka ...
* Yukaghir * The Ket language has a very sophisticated verbal inclination system, referring to the object in many ways (see also polypersonal agreement). All varieties of Melanesian Pidgin use ''-im'' or ''-em'' as a transitivity marker: ''laik'' means 'want', while ''laikim'' means 'like (him/her/it)' in
Tok Pisin Tok Pisin (,Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student’s Handbook'', Edinburgh ; Tok Pisin ), often referred to by English speakers as "New Guinea Pidgin" or simply Pidgin, is a creole language spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. It is an ...
. All varieties of Salish.


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 ten formal and semantic features (some binary, some scalar); the features argued to be associated with the degree of transitivity are summarized in the following well-known table: Næss (2007) has argued at length for the following two points: # Though formally a broad category of phenomena, transitivity boils down to a way to ''maximally distinguish'' the two participants involved (pp. 22–25); # Major participants are describable in terms of the semantic features �Volitional �Instigating �Affectedwhich makes them distinctive from each other. Different combinations of these binary values will yield different types of participants (pg. 89), which are then compatible or incompatible with different verbs. Individual languages may, of course, make more fine-grained distinctions (chapter 5). Types of participants discussed include: *Volitional Undergoers (some Experiencer, Recipients, Beneficiaries): Vol
Inst Inst may refer to: * As "inst.", abbreviation for instant, with reference to time * Alternative shortened Instagram name * As "inst.", abbreviation for '' instante mense'', meaning a date of the current month, such as "the 5th inst." * The Royal Be ...
Aff:ex. ''me'' in Spanish ''Me gusta.'' I like it.'*Force: Vol
Inst Inst may refer to: * As "inst.", abbreviation for instant, with reference to time * Alternative shortened Instagram name * As "inst.", abbreviation for '' instante mense'', meaning a date of the current month, such as "the 5th inst." * The Royal Be ...
Aff :ex. ''the tornado'' in ''The tornado broke my windows.'' *Instrument: Vol
Inst Inst may refer to: * As "inst.", abbreviation for instant, with reference to time * Alternative shortened Instagram name * As "inst.", abbreviation for '' instante mense'', meaning a date of the current month, such as "the 5th inst." * The Royal Be ...
Aff:ex. ''the hammer'' in ''The hammer broke the cup.''


See also

* Differential object marking * Ergative–absolutive language *
Impersonal verb In linguistics, an impersonal verb is one that has no determinate subject. For example, in the sentence "''It rains''", ''rain'' is an impersonal verb and the pronoun ''it'' does not refer to anything. In many languages the verb takes a third p ...
* Unaccusative verb


Notes


References

* Dryer, Matthew S. 2007
Clause types
In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, Vol. 1, 224–275. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * * * Translation of the title: ''At the cradle of languages''.


External links

*http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/features/morphosemantic/transitivity/ do
10.15126/SMG.18/1.09


{{Authority control Grammatical categories