Structural and Functional Dimensions of Verbal Transitivity and the Object in English and Bulgarian

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Pages: 9-30

Abstract:

Despite their common and frequent usage in grammar, transitivity as a pivotal linguistic category and the closely related notion of Object have always posed considerable theoretical problems. The strictly formalistic approach of autonomous syntax does not lead to a satisfactory exhaustive definition of the term ‘Object’. In traditional structural grammars on the other hand the notion has been broadened so that it subsumes clausal constituents with rather inhomogeneous characteristics. Theoretically most viable for the account of predicate – object relations is the framework of Functional Grammar with its concepts of predicate frame and Object assignment. Within that theoretical framework we have outlined in this paper a productive pattern in English for the derivation of transitive predicates from intransitive ones.

Keywords:

transitivity, object, predicate, predicate frame, autonomous syntax, functional grammar, derived transitivity.

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