Sunday, November 2, 2014

Detail #118: Having Different Ways of Structuring Transitive and Intransitive Verb Chains

Oftentimes when recounting events, the utterance will be a chain of verb phrases. Some languages grammaticalize this into various kinds of verb-chaining structures and switch reference and the like.

Imagine wildly different strategies developing for transitive and intransitive verbs. Let's say the object slot also is the slot that would have taken the switch reference marker had not an object been present - the object blocks switch-reference marking. Maybe transitive verbs instead have grammaticalized some kind of obviative-proximative thing.


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