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Anna Margetts, Peter K Austin

Three-participant events in the languages of the world: towards a crosslinguistic typology

Although one- and two-participant events, as expressed by intransitive and transitive constructions, have been extensively studied from a crosslinguistic perspective, little work has been done on three-participant events and the ways they operate in different languages. Where there is description and analysis it is typically confined to syntactic three-place predicates ignoring functional equivalent constructions in languages where such events may be realized with other argument configurations. Also, where analysis exists, it is typically limited to those three-participant events that get lexicalized as three-place predicates in English and other well-known languages. In this article, we explore the semantic categories of three-participant events and outline a range of different strategies for coding them crosslinguistically. We show that, as alternatives to syntactic three-place strategies, there are a variety of constructions that are syntactically two-place but express a third participant by some other means — morphological, syntactic, or pragmatic.

Linguistics, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0024-3949
Volume: 45, 05/2007
Pages: 393 - 451

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