On the Lexical Distribution of Agent-preserving and Object-preserving Transitivity Alternations

This article gives a cognitively based account of polysemous transitivity alternations, which are Agent-preserving with some verbs and Object-preserving with others. The data from three languages – Asiatic Eskimo, Boumaa Fijian and Bambara – are presented. It is argued that the mechanism of the dist...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nordic Journal of Linguistics
Main Author: Kazenin, Konstantin I.
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 1994
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1017/s0332586500002985
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0332586500002985
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Summary:This article gives a cognitively based account of polysemous transitivity alternations, which are Agent-preserving with some verbs and Object-preserving with others. The data from three languages – Asiatic Eskimo, Boumaa Fijian and Bambara – are presented. It is argued that the mechanism of the distribution of the meanings of these TAs is semantic in nature and does not depend upon the coding technique used by a language.