Surveying the encoding of the semantic roles of recipient, beneficiary, and recipient-beneficiary from a crosslinguistic perspective, the paper has two goals. First, by focusing on the encoding of the dual role of recipient-beneficiary, it tries to show that languages vary in the marking of this role: they either encode it the same way as they encode recipients or beneficiaries; in the case of recipient and beneficiary this variation is excluded. Second, current definitions of the label benefactive will be scrutinized, since this notion is split in a number of languages and the terminology proposed here is empirically more appropriate in some cases.
Please cite this paper as: Kittilä, Seppo. (2006) The anomaly of the verb 'give' explained by its high (formal and semantic) transitivity. Linguistics 44: 569-612.Abstract 'Give' is a very atypical trivalent verb in many ways. In the present paper, an explanation for this anomaly will be proposed. The goal of the paper at hand is to show that the anomaly of 'give' follows from its high formal transitivity, which also has a semantic basis. This means that 'give' shares a number of features with highly transitive two-actant clauses and thus outranks other trivalent verbs in formal transitivity in languages in which there are at least two syntactic classes of trivalent verbs. The discussed features comprise the number and marking of arguments, traits of verb morphology and verbal agreement and the application of operations like passive and dative shift. The analysis is not applicable to all languages, but the uniformity languages display in this respect cannot be a mere coincidence. After the formal analysis, some reasons that underlie the high formal transitivity of 'give' will be examined.
This paper summarizes current findings in the cross‐linguistic study of meteorological constructions. It provides both a typology of weather events and a typology of encoding formats used for the expression of weather in and across languages. The discussion shows that there is a correlation between these two parameters: there are clear tendencies in the distribution of the various encoding types across the various event types. This gives rise to a typology of languages which explains linguistic variation in the encoding of meteorological events.
This paper examines Differential R Marking (DRM)-i.e., the effects of animacy on the encoding of goals (R), as in 'a linguist sent a book to the phonetician/to the town'-from a crosslinguistic perspective. The phenomenon comprises three types, which are distinguished based on whether R can be marked in the same way as the transitive Patient or not (animate Rs usually allow this, while inanimate Rs usually surface as obliques). Even though DRM shares common features with Differential Object Marking (DOM), the two phenomena cannot be explained by the same functions. The findings of this article support the view that differences in object coding (comprising both DRM and DOM) are best explained by affectedness rather than ambiguity avoidance.
The present paper discusses formal and semantic features of so-called "Involuntary Agent Constructions" (lAC for short) from a crosslinguistic perspective. The label refers to constructions that express the meaning 'do sth. accidentally/involuntarily'. This means that in contrast to a canonical agent the feature of volitionality is lacking. The paper shows that volitionality (and thus agency) is an important part of linguistic transitivity, since in many languages lAC's are formally less transitive constructions than canonical transitive clauses. On the basis of their formal features, lAC's will be divided into four types. In addition to the formal typology of lAC's, the paper also discusses semantic features that condition the use of lAC's in languages. These include the semantics of events and the nature of the agent. On the basis of these features it is shown that lAC's are constructions that express the unexpected low degree of agency associated with an event. For example, forces like 'wind' do not readily appear in lAC's due to their inherently low degree of agency. Also the additional functions that lAC's can express are discussed.
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