tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jan 11 00:44:34 2006
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Re: transitivity
- From: "QeS 'utlh" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: transitivity
- Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2006 18:44:12 +1000
- Bcc:
ghItlhpu' ter'eS, ja':
>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.
In some languages, verbs of weather are arguably zero-valent.
>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.
Sometimes, a big or unusual one. "To hit", for instance, is
surface-intransitive in all North-West Caucasian languages.
>So, the answer to the question "Is {jISop} transitive or intransitive?" is
>"Both: {Sop} is always semantically bivalent/
>transitive;
Why couldn't the *semantic* valency differ between languages as well as the
grammatical valency? Particularly with a verb like "to eat", where the
semantics could be focusing on the action ("he's eating") or on the object
("he's eating the fish"). And what do you do about {yIn} "to live"? Judging
from what Okrand has said in previous interviews, {yIn} is underlyingly
bivalent, although in practice the "object" of the action is hardly ever
expressed. It could be argued that any non-stative verb in Klingon is
theoretically able to take an object (including such fundamental
"intransitives" as {Qong} and {yIt}).
>There are no semantically trivalent verbs in Klingon,
Depends on how you define "trivalent". Following your argument, I would have
said that "to give" is semantically trivalent (taking the underlying
arguments as Agent, Patient and Goal), but due to the inherent bivalent
limitation on licensing of arguments in the Klingon verb, only two of those
arguments ever surface: the agent as subject, and the patient as object.
However, with the prefix trick, the verb licenses the Goal argument instead,
allowing the Patient to stand in normal object position syntactically and
the Agent to be, well, the Agent.
>but the prefix trick is a grammatical valency increasing
>operation: {paq qanob} "I give you a book"! Fun stuff!
Very fun. But also, very hard to resolve... {{:)
QeS 'utlh
tlhIngan Hol yejHaD pabpo' / Grammarian of the Klingon Language Institute
not nItoj Hemey ngo' juppu' ngo' je
(Old roads and old friends will never deceive you)
- Ubykh Hol vIttlhegh
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