Re: Question about transitivity/intransitivity

Quoting Doug Dee <AmateurLinguist@...>:

> In a message dated 5/28/2003 3:17:02 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> christophe.grandsire@FREE.FR writes:
>
>
> >But there
> >are other languages for which transitive verbs *must* be used with an
> >object, even when you don't want to specify it. In other words, in
> those
> >languages a sentence like *"I eat" is ungrammatical. You *have* to say
> at
> >least "I eat something". In those languages, the
> transitive/intransitive
> >distinction is much clearer than in English.
>
>
> In my conlang Revonian, if you want to use a basically transitive verb
> like
> "eat" without an object (as in "no, thank you, I've already eaten") you
> have to
> attach the "unspecified object" suffix to the verb, making it
> intransitive.
> The theory here was that since word order is fairly free, the speaker
> should
> give the hearers an indication of whether or not they should be
> expecting to
> find an object for that verb later in the sentence.
In Altaii, where word-order is everything but free, you have to supply an
suffix _-eiz-_ to make a transitive intransitive. Eg _ma izi nhaz_ "I eat
cheese", vs _ma nhazeiza_ "I eat". There's also a corresponding passive that
lets you drop the subject; _izi nhazola_ "cheese is eaten".

                                                            Andreas