Cagliari, Italy 15-18 September 2003
ALT V Conference
Åshild Næss
Intransitive eating: The affected agent and its challengeto theories of transitivity
The so-called ingestive verbs, that is, verbs which have as part of their
meaning “a semantic feature of taking something into the body or mind”
(Masica 1976), show a somewhat troublesome behaviour cross-linguistically. The
verb eat and its translation equivalents occur in language after language
in constructions that deviate from the transitive prototype. The
‘ambitransitive’ behaviour of this verb in English and many other languages is
only one example; a few others are oblique marking of the O argument in Trumai
and Bororo, lack of object case-marking in Chepang, and the applicability of
causative constructions normally restricted to intransitive verbs to ‘eat’ and
similar verbs in a broad range of languages.
Nevertheless, current theories of transitivity treat ‘eat’ as a highly transitive verb; in fact it is often cited as a core example of a prototypical transitive verb (see e.g. Andrews 1985). Tsunoda (1985) observes that ‘eat’ patterns formally with what he calls ‘non-resultative’ (and so less semantically transitive) verbs in certain respects, but offers no explanation for why this should be so; according to his own semantic criteria, ‘eat’ belongs to the class of prototypical transitive verbs (describing actions which necessarily create a change in their patient). Other accounts of the semantics of transitivity, such as that of Hopper and Thompson (1980), do not, either, succeed in identifying any property which might separate ‘eat’ from verbs which do show prototypical transitive encoding cross-linguistically.
I will argue that this crucial property which is responsible for the reduced semantic transitivity of ‘eat’ and similar verbs is that of having an affected agent argument (Saksena 1980). A verb like ‘eat’ not only affects its patient, it also has a consistent and salient effect on its agent, and it is this latter effect which generally constitutes the motivation of the agent for performing the act. It is this fact which distinguishes ‘eat’ from fully transitive verbs like ‘kill’ or ‘break’, which typically affect their patient only.
Standard accounts of transitivity refer only to affectedness of the patient and to properties such as volitionality and animacy of the agent, and so have no way of explaining how affectedness of the agent would render a verb less semantically transitive. I will argue that a prototypical transitive clause must be defined in terms of maximal semantic opposition of its arguments: if it is a defining characteristic of an agent argument that it volitionally instigates the action, and of the patient that it is affected by the action, then it is also characteristic of the patient that it is not volitional and instigating, and of the agent that it is nonaffected. In other words, a prototypical transitive clause has one volitional instigator and one affected argument, and any deviation from this maximal semantic distinction between arguments leads to a less semantically transitive clause, which may be reflected formally in the encoding of such a clause differently from clauses which do show such maximal semantic opposition of arguments.
References:
Andrews, Avery. 1985. “The major functions of the noun phrase”. In Shopen, Timothy (ed.): Language typology and syntactic description. Volume I: Clause structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 62-154.
Hopper, Paul J., and Sandra A. Thompson. 1980. “Transitivity in grammar and discourse.” Language 56:251-299.
Masica, Colin P. 1976. Defining a linguistic area: South Asia. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
Saksena, Anuradha. 1980. “The Affected Agent”. Language 56:812-826.
Tsunoda, Tasaku. 1985. “Remarks on transitivity”. Journal of Linguistics 21, 385-396.