Studies in Transitivity: Syntax and Semantics

Syntax and Semantics, Volume 15: Studies in Transitivity provides information pertinent to the fundamental aspects of the study of transitivity. This book discusses how to present events and situations with respect to their participants, and the grammatical consequences of such decisions. Organized into 21 chapters, this volume begins with an overview of the grammar and pragmatics of actions and their participants. This text then examines one aspect of the syntactic resolution of clause-internal coreference. Other chapters consider that clauses with more highly transitive components are more likely to be coded as transitive than those with fewer transitive components. This book discusses as well the assumption that French causative sentences may receive either an active or a passive interpretation. The final chapter deals with two types of two-argument sentences in Japanese. This book is a valuable resource for linguists and scholars pursuing questions of discourse, language topology, universal grammar, semantics, and grammatical description and theory.