New book - Prototypical Transitivity

[Åshild Næss]

Dear typologists,

The following recently published book may be of interest to the list's
members:

Næss, Åshild: Prototypical Transitivity. [Typological Studies in
Language 72]. John Benjamins.

The book argues that the assumed universality of a Hopper and
Thompson-style transitive prototype is due to the fact that this
prototype defines an event structure involving two clearly distinct,
independent participants - distinct both in terms of their physical
independence and high degree of individuation, and in terms of their
involvement (agentive vs. patientive) in the event. The crosslinguistic
association of this semantic prototype with a particular type of formal
structure then receives a functional explanation in terms of iconicity:
a structure with two distinct, independent syntactic arguments is
prototypically used to refer to an event involving two distinct,
independent participants.

Transitivity being a fairly basic concept of grammar, the book should be
of general interest to typologists and descriptive linguists. For more
information, see the attached flyer.

Best,

Åshild

-- 
Åshild Næss
Postdoctoral researcher
Dept. of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies
University of Oslo
P.O. Box 1102 Blindern
0317 Oslo, Norway

Phone: (+47) 22 84 40 06

Office: HW327



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