tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jan 10 19:17:18 2006

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transitivity

Terrence Donnelly ([email protected])

• From: Terrence Donnelly <[email protected]>
• Subject: transitivity
• Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2006 19:17:02 -0800 (PST)
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I've been reading a book on linguistics lately, and
came across
a concept that might relate to the question of whether
Klingon
verbs are transitive or intransitive.

In any language, each predicate (basically, verb)
needs a 
certain number of participants, or arguments, to
complete 
its meaning. This is called its valency. Every verb
has at 
least one argument: the subject, which is a valency of
one. 
Some verbs have two arguments: subject and object, for
a 
valency of two. In Klingon, {poS} is a univalent verb,
with 
only a subject: poS(x). The verb {Sop} is bivalent:
Sop(x,y), 
that is, the concept of "eat" needs both an eater and
the 
thing eaten to complete its meaning.

There are two kinds of valency: semantic valency,
which is what
I described above, and that represents the "core"
meaning of a
verb, and grammatical valency, which is the number of
arguments
actually present in a given verb phrase.

Valency is also related to transitivity: transitive
verbs are
bivalent, and intransitive verbs are univalent. 
Again, there
is a distinction between semantic and grammatical
(in)transitivity.

There are mechanisms in any language to change the
valency of a
verb phrase, either semantically or grammatically, and
Klingon
is no exception.  Semantically: {-moH} increases
valency:
poS(x) > poSmoH(x,y).  Grammatically: {qagh vISop} is
bivalent,
while {jISop} is univalent.

So, the answer to the question "Is {jISop} transitive
or 
intransitive?" is "Both: {Sop} is always semantically
bivalent/
transitive; but {jISop} is grammatically
univalent/intransitive."

Another grammatical valency decreasing operation is
the suffix
{-lu'}, which removes an overt agent: legh(x,y) >
leghlu'(y).
There are no semantically trivalent verbs in Klingon,
but the
prefix trick is a grammatical valency increasing
operation:
{paq qanob} "I give you a book"!

Fun stuff!

-- ter'eS

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