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Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2026
Abstract
Transitivity involves a number of components, only one of which is the presence of an object of the verb. These components are all concerned with the effectiveness with which an action takes place, e.g., the punctuality and telicity of the verb, the conscious activity of the agent, and the referentiality and degree of affectedness of the object. These components co-vary with one another in language after language, which suggests that Transitivity is a central property of language use. The grammatical and semantic prominence of Transitivity is shown to derive from its characteristic discourse function: high Transitivity is correlated with foregrounding, and low Transitivity with backgrounding.
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- Language Centennial Celebration:
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Footnotes
‡
[Editorial note: This article was originally published in Language 56(2).251–99, 1980. In celebration of the Centennial of the Linguistic Society of America and of this journal, we are reprinting one or two articles per each decade of Language, selected for their quality and importance to the field. Each article is accompanied by a new piece by colleagues who have expertise and unique insights on the reprinted articles, to offer commentary from both historical and modern perspectives.]
*
An earlier version of this paper was presented as a colloquium at the Summer Meeting of the LSA, July 1978. We thank the discussants for their willingness to become involved in our hypothesis and for their valuable advice: Bernard Comrie, Edith Moravcsik, Ellen Prince, and Jerry Sadock. In addition, the following people have been generous in offering comments and discussion on the ideas in this paper: Judith Aissen, Bernard Comrie, Leonard Faltz, Sheldon Harrison, Robert Hetzron, Robert Kirsner, Robert Longacre, Edith Moravcsik, Jean Mulder, Paul Schachter, Maureen Schmid, Russell Schuh, and Stanley Starosta. We are very grateful to all these people for their help, and hereby absolve them of any responsibility for the use we may have made of it.
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