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Further thoughts.... On 6/17/05, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@hidden.email> wrote: > On 6/16/05, Rex May <rmay@hidden.email> wrote: > > I'm trying to pin down just what the transitive-intransitive thing > > really means, and what it implies for how ceqli should work. > > > > It seems that there are words like `kom' that are intrinsically > > transitive. > > "Go kom" – We hear this as transitive, whether it has an indicated > > object or not. Other such words are "ku," "bua", "xau," "pomo," – > > all of these have an implied object. > > I'm not a real linguist, but I think you might be misusing the word > "transitive". If a *verb* doesn't have an *object* in a particular sentence, > it's being used intransitively, and is therefore not mandatorily transitive, > even if the *action* the verb refers to necessarily has a *patient*. > > Or maybe there is logical transitivity and grammatical transitivity, > and you're talking about one and I'm talking about the other. > Anyway, they shouldn't be confused. It seems there are several kinds of grammatical intransitivity. One results from leaving out the object that a normally transitive verb normally requires, leaving some default object "understood". Another involves a verb referring to an action that doesn't involve someone affecing a patient. Yet another results from turning a transitive verb into an intranstive verb, with a sense that requires the *object* of the transitive verb to become the *subject* of the new intransitive verb. This last process usually (always?) happens without any explicit marking on the verb in English, but some other languages (Esperanto, Hebrew, probably lots of others) use an affix or other marking on the verb. > > Then we have verbs that are, in English, capable of being both. > > Cook, burn, etc. > > In ceqli, I think maybe such verbs should be intransitive in the base > > form. > > to karn tunu. The meat cooks. > > go tunufa to karn. I cook the meat. > > > > But what do you think? Am I being anglocentric here? If "tunu" > > remains transitive, then we'd have: > > > > go tunu to karn. > > to tunu bekarn. > > > > And maybe that's better. Because when something cooks, or burns, > > something is almost always acting on it. > > Yes, I think the latter makes sense. > > You might have a rule that verbs which refer to > actions that necessarily have an actor affecting > a patient are always transitive, with the subject > being the actor and the object being the patient. Alternatively, since probably all verbs can be sometimes used intransitively, while there are some verbs that can _only_ be used intransitively, maybe the rule is that all verbs are intransitive unless marked as transitive. I'm not sure how that would work out. It might injure conciseness, too. Maybe I'm confusing valence with transitivity. Maybe we have some transitive verbs (e.g. kom) that can optionally be used valence one instead of their normal two; but the primary argument still has the same relation to the action referred to by the verb, so it's still really the same verb...? -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/review/log.htm