Re: Question about transitivity/intransitivity

Nik Taylor scripsit:

> The defining characteristic about unaccusatives is that the subject of
> the intransitive is the *patient*, the affected.  "I melt the ice" ->
> "The ice melted"; "The bomber sank the battleship" -> "The battleship
> sank", "I burned the house" -> "The house burned"
I just read, BTW, a very interesting article by Randy LaPolla to the
effect that Chinese is neither accusative nor ergative (syntactically
speaking), but has missing arguments in conjunctive sentences filled in
by purely pragmatic considerations -- and in fact that "subject" and
"object", used in their syntactic sense, just plain make no sense for
Chinese at all.

It seems that it is very difficult for Chinese-speakers to accept that
syntactic accusativity *compels* the English sentence "The man dropped
the melon on the ground and burst" to mean "The man dropped the melon on
the ground and the man burst" rather than the semantically obvious "The
man dropped the melon on the ground and the melon burst" which is what
the equivalent Chinese sentence "Nei ge ren ba xigua diao zai dishang,
sui le" would almost certainly mean.

Yet Chinese is not syntactically ergative either, because replacing _sui_
'burst' with the syntactically equivalent verb _huang_ 'get flustered'
produces a sentence meaning "The man dropped the melon on the ground
and the man got flustered".  In short, Chinese just doesn't constrain
the meaning of such sentences syntactically, and so the listener's full
semantic reasoner has to come into play in order to understand them
correctly in context.

http://personal.cityu.edu.hk/~ctrandy/subjobj.pdf

--
You escaped them by the will-death              John Cowan
and the Way of the Black Wheel.                 jcowan@reutershealth.com
I could not.  --Great-Souled Sam                http://www.ccil.org/~cowan