Publications

Publication details [#20416]

Hooley, Bruce A. 1986. Is the transitive/intransitive dichotomy real? In Tracy, Karen, ed. Understanding face-to-face interaction: Issues linking goals and discourse. Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 39–46.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Language as a subject

Annotation

H. argues that, for English and Buang (Papua New Guinea), there is no need to set up two seperate structural descriptions for transitive as opposed to intransitive constructions, but that all verbs may be considered as being at least two-place. Wether or not the second nominal needs to be expressed is then not so much determined by the grammar, but by questions of semantics, contextual clues, and culture.