is chapter is a summary of semantic, syntactic, and stylistic observations concerning light verb constructions. e plenitude of opinions raised in connection with verb- noun collocations makes it clear that, whichever criterion is given priority, light verb constructions remain a heterogeneous group with a continuum ranging from typical and non-typical members.
eir internal syntactic relations remain rather unclear. Butt ([16], p. 3) claims that in light verb constructions “the predication is primary and hence monoclausal, the grammatical functional structure is that of a simple predicate: there is only a single subject and no embedding (no control raising)”¹⁷. e FGD-based annotation indi- cates a special type of control (quasi-control) between the light verb and the predicate noun. Kolářová-Řezníčková has performed an analysis of the valency behaviour of verbs and nouns within the light-verb frames as well as an analysis of deverbal noun valency outside light verb constructions to find out more or less that the decision whether a modification is governed by the light verb or by the predicate noun is to be taken for each single light verb construction separately.
e light-verb constructions specific quasicontrol indicates that the light verb and the noun share the participants wherever it is not absolutely evident from the surface realization that the given participant belongs only to one of them, which enables the option of capturing them both in the light verb entries in Swe-Vallex and in the predicate noun entries in PNL. e lexically-centered approach formulated by [60] was adopted for the selection of entry candidates.
¹⁷It is, however, not clear whether this is a universal claim, since she mainly argues with a number of exotic languages.
Chapter 5
e Transitivity Hypothesis
5.1
What is Transitivity and (why) does it Matter?
is chapter attempts to apply a very abstract linguistic hypothesis (the Transitivity Hypothesis) to observations of Swedish daily language use, in order to trace the pos- sible impact of this hypothesis on basic verbs and their noun collocates in light verb constructions. Admittedly, it may turn out that there is no impact at all. Even if there were some, proving this and exploring this impact in a proper way would go beyond the scope of this thesis and mainly beyond the linguistic competence of an occasional, non-native speaker of Swedish.
However, the hypothesis is so fascinating in its extraordinariness, that it invites to a closer investigation and comparison with living language data. Why not take its existence into account when anyway performing a detailed analysis of selected morphosyntactic units and why not provide sorted lexical evidence for further in- terpretation – the more so since a thorough corpus-based study on the impact of the Transitivity Hypothesis on Swedish has already been published [86], see Section 5.6. Its statistical interpretation was not directly a bullet-proof corroboration of the Tran- sitivity Hypothesis, but, in the context of the entire study, it evidently inspired and encouraged further investigation.
According to the Transitivity Hypothesis, formulated by Hopper and ompson [67], one of the primary cross-linguistically effective goals of certain morphosyntactic categories is to structure the discourse. Information structuring is very important in a discourse. For listeners and readers it is crucial to be able to distinguish between background information and the content being conveyed as substantial at the mo- ment of speaking and writing. A cooperative speaker makes this distinction clear by employing – probably unconsciously – a number of morphosyntactic markers of dis-
course backgrounding vs. discourse foregrounding – in other words: the interplay
of certain morphosyntactic markers can decide whether an event will be perceived as foregrounded or as backgrounded.
52 CHAPTER 5. THE TRANSITIVITY HYPOTHESIS
Foregrounded information has typically the following features: • telic event
• punctual • volitional
• agent inherently volitional (animate) • affirmative (not negated)
• real (not interrogative or conditional) • with a patient
• patient individuated
Backgrounded information has typically the following features: • atelic event
• durative process or state • non-volitional
• agent inherently non-volitional • negated
• unreal (conditional or interrogative) • lacking patient
• patient not individuated • no agent (natural processes)
e more significant the effect of the Agent on the Patient, the more foregrounded such an event tends to be. Finally, the more individuated the patient (i.e. count, definite, referential, animate, and preferably a proper name), the more likely the given event would be foregrounded. All the mentioned cognitive features have to do with the speaker’s assessment of how much the world has changed with the event described. e more substantial the change, the more foregrounding it deserves.
e explanation is, according to Hopper and ompson, surprisingly straightfor- ward: what attracts attention and deserves a verbal comment is usually a change in the non-linguistic reality, rather than a status quo – at least in narrative texts. Hopper
5.1. WHAT IS TRANSITIVITY AND (WHY) DOES IT MATTER? 53 and ompson [67] group all the cognitive features just mentioned above (see also Figure 5.1) into one semantic concept, which they call Transitivity (with a capital T). Transitivity in the conception of Hopper and ompson is not confined to verbs that require a direct object, but it is rather a scale-like, continuous semantic phenomenon. It expresses the extent to which a Patient was affected by an Agent in an event. Tran- sitivity can be higher or lower, depending on the values of the features mentioned. Even events with only one or no agent have their degree of Transitivity depending on the feature values that are not related to the number of participants of the given event. Hopper and ompson ([67], p. 254) generalize their observations by the claim that the component features of Transitivity “CO-VARY extensively and systematically […] Whenever an obligatory pairing of two Transitivity features occurs in the mor- phosyntax or semantics of a clause, THE PAIRED FEATURES ARE ALWAYS ON THE SAME SIDE OF THE HIGH-LOW TRANSITIVITY SCALE”. Both [67] and [86] suggest that there is a correlation between verb aspect and the individuation of the noun in the direct object position (cf. [86] and Section 5.6 on Greek compared to Swedish and Polish).
Example sentences 42 – 45 show alternations in the Transitivity features Telicity, Punctuality, and Individuation of the Patient.
(42) Peter wrote the names down. (43) Peter was writing the names down. (44) Peter was writing names down. (45) Peter was writing.
Example 42 describes a telic, punctual action affecting a patient that has a clearly limited shape – i.e., the Patient is individuated. It is the most Transitive interpretation of the event in 42 – 45. Example 43 is not punctual, but it is telic. erefore it is less Transitive than 42. e event described by 44 is lower in Transitivity than 42: it is not punctual, and the Patient is not individuated (we do not know whether Peter is supposed to write down a specific number of names or whether he is supposed to keep on writing names down for an indefinite period of time). e last example (45) is the least Transitive of all – it is not punctual, and the Patient is generalized (even if it is evident from the context).
According to the Transitivity Hypothesis, if the verb-related features Telicity and Punctuality correlate with the noun-related features that together represent Individ- uation, as suggested by [67] and studied on corpus data by [86], they should, wher- ever co-occurring, have their values on the same side of the High – Low Transitivity scale: “If two clauses (a) and (b) in a language differ in that (a) is higher in Tran-
sitivity according to any of the features […], then, if a concomitant grammat- ical or semantic difference appears elsewhere in the clause, that difference will also show (a) to be higher in Transitivity” ([67], p. 255). Hence, foregrounded
54 CHAPTER 5. THE TRANSITIVITY HYPOTHESIS
sentences are expected to combine punctual/telic verbs with individuated patients, whereas backgrounded sentences are expected to combine processual/atelic verbs with non-individuated patients. Indeed, a sentence such as 46 sounds odd, at any rate com- pared to 47, since write in the simple past tense evokes a more telic and/or punctual reading than when used as a past participle, and the absence of a Patient appears in- appropriate in 46, but not in 47.
(46) Peter wrote. (47) Peter was writing.
A problem with the Transitivity Hypothesis arises when we compare sentences that differ in more than one Transitivity feature value. Do all the cognitive features have the same weight? Is, e.g., a punctual transition with an agentive Agent and a volitional action like Peter stood up less transitive than the non-volitional Peter forgot
his bag at school just because it cannot get any points for the features associated with
the direct objects, while forget does?
Do the values of the Transitivity-affecting morphosyntactic features change ac- cording to which aspect of the event the speaker decides to focus on, or should 42 – 45 sooner be conceived as different event types? In other words, are the selected combinations of morphosyntactic values just an indicator of the given Transitivity degree that is inherent in the particular event, or do the morphosyntactic features, perhaps along with some lexical and contextual features, provide the sentence with its particular degree of Transitivity? Is it cognition that shapes the grammar here, or vice versa?
In addition, the Transitivity Hypothesis, as formulated above in bold, implies that languages can differ as to which feature values should be counted as salient and which are only ‘concomitant’ when expressed by a morphosyntactic category (and therefore probably should not affect the score).
Lindvall [86] showed that the assumed correlation between the verb event struc- ture and the noun definiteness applies for a language in which both are rendered by morphological categories (Greek), but the comparison of Polish and Swedish paral- lel texts (see Section 5.6 for details) concluded with a supposition rather than with a truly revolutionary finding in respect of the correlation between the grammatically rendered verb aspect in Polish and the grammatically rendered noun definiteness in Swedish.
However, according to Lindvall, the statistics would have been much more in favour of the Transitivity Hypothesis if the rating had been expanded beyond the purely morphosyntactic markers towards semantic hints in the context. erefore it is still not certain whether the correlation between event structure and noun definiteness is also present in languages that do not render one of the supposedly paired categories by obligatory morphological categories and whether such pairing can be assumed to be cross-linguistically universal or not.