| Summary: | This paper describes morphological intransitive/transitive verb alternation in Koryak and aims to characterize it according toa typological perspective. There is one problematic pattern for the characterizationof morphological intransitive/transitive alternationin Koryak:the intransitive/transitive pair formed by the productive affixes, -et/-at(intr.) andj-.-ev/-av(tr.), which has been regarded as an example of equipollent alternation. Through the examination of both semantic and morphological features of the suffixes, the present paper clarifiesthat the suffixes themselveshave neither a detransitivizing nor a transitivizing function and that only the prefix j-bearsthe function of transitivization. This analysis revealsthat Koryak is a highly transitivizing language, a finding thatagrees well with Nichols et al.’s(2004) suggestionthat in North Asia,transitivization is more prevalentand frequentthan any other typesof intransitive/transitive verb alternation.
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