Terminology for verbal derivation

[Daniel Everett]

Dear John,

There is not really a good term for these kinds of general-purpose markers of transitivity differences. Sally Thomason and I wrote a couple of papers (with different combinations of folks) on something similar in Montana Salish about 20 years ago. We noticed that the language had markers for changes in valency (lexical) and other markers for changes in transitivity (syntactic).

The original paper is here: http://wals.info/refdb/record/3812

All the best,

Dan
On Jul 16, 2012, at 1:40 AM, john wrote:

> 
> 
> Dear Funknetters, 
> 
> I'm looking for a term to use to refer to a form
> for deriving verbs in Bari (-kindya) which seems to 
> 
> generally add an
> argument to the verb, but the argument can be any one of a variety of
> types--it can be 
> 
> an indirect object, a directional particle, just
> about anything it seems (for example, when added to the 
> 
> root meaning
> 'old age', it can take as an argument a place, with the meaning 'to live
> to an old age while 
> 
> living continuously at that place', or a
> nominalized form of a verb referring to an occupation, with the
> 
> 
> meaning 'to live to an old age while continuing to work at that
> occupation'). Do you have any ideas what 
> 
> term I might use to refer to
> this form of the verb? I was initially going to call it the
> 'Benefactive' because 
> 
> it's often used to add an indirect object (e.g.
> 'close a door for someone') but when I looked at all of the 
> 
> usages of
> this form it became clear that this is really a pretty small minority of
> its uses. 
> 
> Any ideas? 
> 
> Thanks, 
> 
> John 
> 
>