Crackers

[Kazuha Watanabe]

In Japanese, we have a transitive-intransitive pair verbs ireru (to put
in)/hairu (enter), and we say the crack entered into the vase or Father
put the crack into the vase.

kabin-ni hibi-ga    hait-ta
vase-DAT crack-NOM  enter-PAST

vs.

chichi-ga  kabin-ni hibi-o    ire-ta
father-NOM vase-DAT crack-ACC put in-PAST

Kazuha Watanabe
Assistant Professor
Modern Languages and Literatures
California State University, Fullerton

> Andrew Koontz-Garboden wrote:
>> Can you get the transitive uses of crack with natural force subjects
>> in Hebrew and German?  E.g., The earthquake cracked the mirror. ?
>>
> Not in Hebrew.
>> There's a great paper by McKoon and Macfarland in Language 2000 that
>> shows that, at least in English, with internally caused COS verbs
>> (which perhaps German and Hebrew 'crack' are?  There are diagnostics
>> that can be used to test...), although agentive transitive uses are
>> very rare in naturally occurring uses, transitive uses with a
>> non-agentive causer are not at all uncommon.
>>
> --
> David Gil
>
> Department of Linguistics
> Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
> Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany
>
> Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550119
> Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
> Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/
>


Kazuha Watanabe
Cornell University
Department of Linguistics
(607)280-1699