Re: Question about transitivity/intransitivity
| From: | Doug Dee <amateurlinguist@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, May 31, 2003, 20:37 |
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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.
Doug
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