Full Description
This book sets up a consistent theoretical and terminological framework for the study of the phenomena that are commonly subsumed under the terms transitivity, valency, and voice. These three concepts are at the heart of the most basic aspects of clausal structure in any language; however, there is considerable cross-linguistic variation in the constraints on how verbs combine with noun phrases that refer to participants in the event that they denote or to the circumstances of the event. In this book, Denis Creissels explores and accounts for the extent of this cross-linguistic variation, capturing its regularities and examining the historical phenomena that have resulted in the emergence of constructions and markers. The novel framework developed in the book allows similar phenomena to be identified across typologically diverse languages, and facilitates systematic comparison of the manifestations of these phenomena in the grammars of individual languages.
Contents
1: Introduction
2: Participant roles and participant coding
3: Syntactic transitivity
4: The transitive construction
5: Transitive-intransitive alignment
6: Impersonal and anti-impersonal constructions
7: Transitive coding and valency
8: Voice alternations
9: Passivization and S-denucleativization
10: Antipassivization
11: Decausativization, reflexivization, reciprocalization, and middle voices
12: Causativization
13: Non-causative A/S-nucleativization
14: Applicativization
15: Flexivalency alternations
16: The noncausal-causal alternation, the psych alternation, and the undirected-directed alternation
17: Noun incorporation, transitivity, and valency
18: Conclusion
