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Seppo Kittil

The anomaly of the verb ‘give’ explained by its high (formal and semantic) transitivity

‘Give’ is a very atypical trivalent verb in many ways. In the present article, an explanation for this anomaly will be proposed. The goal of the article at hand is to show that the anomaly of ‘give’ follows from its high formal transitivity, which also has a semantic basis. This means that ‘give’ shares a number of features with highly transitive two-actant clauses and thus outranks other trivalent verbs in formal transitivity in languages in which there are at least two syntactic classes of trivalent verbs. The discussed features comprise the number and marking of arguments, traits of verb morphology and verbal agreement, and the application of operations like passive and dative shift. The analysis is not applicable to all languages, but the uniformity languages display in this respect cannot be a mere coincidence. After the formal analysis, some reasons that underlie the high formal transitivity of ‘give’ will be examined.

Linguistics, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0024-3949
Volume: 44, 05/2006
Pages: 569 - 612

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