Transitivity and Valency Alternations

Studies on Japanese and Beyond

Taro Kageyama, Wesley M. Jacobsen, Taro Kageyama, Wesley M. Jacobsen

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783110475241
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110475302
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection of papers is the first book ever published in English that presents detailed analyses of valency and transitivity alternations in Japanese from multifaceted standpoints: morphology, semantics, syntax, dialects, history, acquisition, and language typology.

I Standard Japanese

Wesley M. Jacobsen

1The semantic basis of Japanese transitive-intransitive derivational patterns

Wesley M. Jacobsen, Harvard University

1Introduction

This chapter revisits the hypothesis originally proposed in Jacobsen (1985) and discussed widely in the literature that patterns of morphological marking in Japanese transitive-intransitive verb pairs correlate to a significant extent with the meaning of such verbs, specifically as to whether the event expressed by a verb pair is more commonly seen in human experience to occur under the influence of an external force or apart from the influence of such a force. It will attempt to clarify what this hypothesis does and does not claim with a view to improving its usefulness as a tool for future research.

Secondly, the chapter considers the challenge posed by Japanese to what may be seen as a pervasive “transitive bias” in linguistic theory, one that tends to view transitive occurrence as having a more central place in human experience and linguistic meaning than intransitive occurrence. Intransitive meanings of three types are distinguished: those where the occurrence of an event is attributed to the effect of a force internal to the event, a force external to the event, or to no force at all. Evidence will be considered from the morphological patterning of Japanese transitive-intransitive verb pairs and from adverb occurrence that the third of these three modes of intransitive occurrence, one that involves no force at all, internal or external, is more basic to some categories of verb meaning than transitive occurrence, and that such meaning constitutes a prototype of intransitive meaning that is in fact more cognitively fundamental to human experience than the commonly recognized transitive prototype.

2The morphology of transitivity alternations in Japanese

With few exceptions, transitive-intransitive verb pairs in Japanese exhibit a morphological stem common to both the transitive and intransitive member of the pair. As illustrated in (1), these pairs can be categorized into three broad groups depending on whether this stem is augmented in the transitive verb (the “causative” pattern of Class A), the intransitive verb (the “anticausative” pattern of Class B), or in both (the “equipollent” pattern of Class C). In each example pair in (1), and hereafter throughout this chapter, the intransitive form is the one on the left.

(1)	A.	Transitive marked	(Causative pattern)
		ak(u)/ak-e(ru)	‘openin/opentr’
		sizum(u)/sizum-e(ru)	‘sinkin/sinktr’
		sodat(u)/sodat-e(ru)	‘grow/raise’
		tuk(u)/tuk-e(ru)	‘become attached/ attach’
		ukab(u)/ukab-e(ru)	‘floatin/floattr
	B.	Intransitive marked	(Anticausative pattern)
		kir-e(ru)/kir(u)	‘become cut/cut’
		kudak-e(ru)/kudak(u)	‘become smashed/smash’
		nuk-e(ru)/nuk(u)	‘come out/ pull out’
		war-e(ru)/war(u)	‘breakin, splitin/breaktr, splittr’
		yak-e(ru)/yak(u)	‘burnin/burntr’
	C.	Equipollent	(Transitive and intransitive equally marked)
		ag-ar(u)/ag-e(ru)	‘rise/raise’
		kaw-ar(u)/ka[w]-e(ru)	‘changein/changetr’
		mag-ar(u)/mag-e(ru)	‘bendin/bendtr’
		sag-ar(u)/sag-e(ru)	‘become lower/ lower’
		tom-ar(u)/tom-e(ru)	‘stopin/stoptr’

Classes A and B may be seen to represent differing patterns of markedness: the longer form in each case is “marked” with morphological material that is absent in the shorter form. The notion of markedness here is understood purely in terms of the relative presence or absence of morphological material, apart from the particular status that extra material may have as a derivational affix. Since marked linguistic forms that are longer or more complex in this way than their corresponding unmarked form require more linguistic effort to produce, the question arises as to why such extra linguistic effort is justified in some cases in the transitive form, in other cases in the intransitive form, and in yet other cases equally in both forms.

The example pairs chosen in (1) all involve the suffix -e(ru), a suffix that marks sometimes transitive, sometimes intransitive forms. The markedness patterns in Classes A and B may also be viewed as a relationship of derivation: in Class A, the transitive member of the pair is derived from the intransitive member by attachment of the -e(ru) suffix, and vice versa in Class B. In the case of Class C, the equal level of markedness would suggest that neither member is derived from the other, but there are differing views on this. Matsumoto (2000, this volume), for example, considers the transitive -e(ru) forms in Class C to be basic, and the intransitive -ar(u) forms derived from them. In line with this, Narrog (this volume) shows that the transitive -e(ru) forms in this class historically predate the intransitive -ar(u) forms. Assuming that the pattern in Class C is a case of transitive to intransitive derivation in modern Japanese requires that the -e(ru) form be treated as derived for certain transitivity pairs and non-derived for others. To avoid complications such as this, I will restrict my attention here to a stricter notion of synchronic derivation, whereby the derived form is created by the addition of morphological material lacking in the basic form, without the loss of any material present in the basic form, so that the derived form is always longer than the basic form.

The pairs listed in (1) are a small subset of the larger group of 306 ‘core’ transitive-intransitive Japanese verb pairs listed in Appendix A of this volume. This list is a revision by Matsumoto (this volume) of the list of transitive-intransitive verbs in Jacobsen (1992), which originally included over 350 pairs categorized into 15 different patterns according to the differing patterns of suffixes used to mark the opposition. Matsumoto’s ‘core’ list adds a number of pairs missing in the original list (indicated as “not in J” in the Appendix), but excludes even more, including numerous compound and deadjectival verb pairs appearing in the original list. There is therefore an overall reduction in the total number of verb pairs listed in the category of ‘core’ oppositions, though 169 additional pairs are listed in Appendix B that depart from the standard formal and semantic character of the ‘core’ oppositions, bringing the total in the two lists to 474 (see Matsumoto this volume).

A type count of all transitivity verb pairs in Japanese in the original Jacobsen (1992) list yields the result that of the three patterns in (1), Class C, the equipollent pattern, is the most dominant, accounting for 58.3% of the total, as opposed to 28.2% for the causative pattern of Class A and 13.5% for the anticausative pattern of Class B. Following Matsumoto’s revised list in the Appendix, where the pattern in Class C is viewed not as equipollent, but as a case of anticausativization, the corresponding percentages are 14.5% for the equipollent pattern, 47.5% for the causative pattern, and 38% for the anticausative pattern. In his historical study, Narrog (this volume) arrives at results similar to those of Matsumoto: 15% (equipollent), 42% (causative), 29% (anticausative), and 14% (indeterminate) for modern Japanese, as compared to 16% (equipollent), 51% (causative), 24% (anticausative), and 9% (indeterminate) for premodern Japanese. All of these results are based on a type count, which is less reflective of actual usage than a token count based on a large corpus of actual data would be. Still, the differences in frequency here are wide enough to allow us to predict with confidence that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• I Standard Japanese
• II Dialects and Ryukyuan
• III History
• IV Acquisition
• V Beyond Japanese
• Appendix A: List of core transitivity pairs in Japanese (by Yo Matsumoto, a revision of Jacobsen (1992))
• Appendix B: List of additional transitivity pairs in Japanese (by Yo Matsumoto, a revision of Jacobsen (1992))
• Subject index
• Endnotes