This paper investigates the extent to which the phenomenon of transitivity contributes to syntactic organization in Ao, a Tibeto-Burman language of north-east India, by considering its manifestations from a pragmatic perspective. Agentive case marking is found to be the only formal correlate of transitivity in this language. This serves an obligatory marking function on actor arguments of verbal clauses expressing the habitual activity of a referent, and agentive marking is also consistently used to distinguish the causer argument of causativized predicates. However, in all other types of clause structures its use is pragmatically determined. Transitivity thus appears to be a construction-based phenomenon that has grammaticalized for only some aspects of Ao clausal syntax.
This paper critically discusses and contrasts some of the different conceptualisations of transitivity that have been presented in the literature, and argues that transitivity as a morphosyntactic phenomenon and effectiveness of an event as a semantic concept should be separated in discussions of transitivity, and also, like many other aspects of grammar, transitivity should be seen as a constructional phenomenon, and so each construction in a language needs to be examined separately, in natural contexts. An Appendix presents some general questions one can consider when analysing language data.
This chapter describes grammaticalization patterns in a broad selection of languages of South Asia, a multilingual region of the world known to constitute a linguistic area in which unrelated languages demonstrate evidence of linguistic convergence. In addition to presenting representative examples of grammaticalization, the chapter specifically considers whether widely recurring patterns in unrelated languages could be induced by language contact. The investigation finds robust evidence for the transfer of seemingly identical cognitive schemas across the genetic boundaries of languages in contact. These target morphemes or constructions with identical meanings in unrelated languages, and they produce grammaticalization outcomes that are not attested in related languages located outside South Asia. Such replicated patterns must cater to a multilingual community’s communicative needs, while at the same time reducing the cognitive burden imposed by multilingualism in a linguistic area.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.