Clases verbales / Valencia

Wednesday 13 | 13:00-15:00 | Sesiones de trabajo
Sala E. Léger, ISH (sótano)
español Réunion interna


This session reviews the subcategories of verb roots, as well as the derivational morphology that derives new members of each class.

  • Intransitive SP: There are many intransitive SP roots. Intransitive SP stems may be derived only from noun roots plus intransitive verbalizing suffixes.
  • Transitive: There are many transitive roots. Transitive stems are derived from noun roots plus transitive verbalizing suffixes, or from intransitive SP stems plus one of 2-4 transitivizing (distinct from causative) suffixes.
  • Ditransitive: There are only two or three ditransitive roots, verbs meaning ‘give’, ‘present’ and ‘put’. Ditransitive stems are productively derived from transitive stems plus a causative suffix.
  • Intransitive SA: There are usually fewer than 10 Intransitive SA roots. Intransitive SA stems are derived from transitive stems or ditransitive stems by the addition of a detransitivizing prefix.

Intransitive SA stems behave crosslinguistically like “middle” verbs: semantics can be reflexive, reciprocal, anticausative, passive, antipassive, idiosyncratic (i.e. not predictable from meaning of the transitive verb) and sometimes deponent (no transitive verb identifiable).

There are also a few meaning-changing derivational suffixes, usually coding aspect: most common are the completive (to completely finish) and iterative ‘do multiple times’, but some languages (e.g. Makushi) have innovated others, like inchoative (begin), terminative (stop, finish), conative (try unsuccessfully) and ‘finally’.