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Transitive vs intransitive verb features? #1042
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I think this is mostly seen as derivational, and thus not considered. I remember somewhere there is/was a feature for I can see something like this used only if there really is a very regular and predictable morphological marking of transitivity. But then, transitivity is still a syntactic issue, and you detect it from the presence or absence of objects or object markers, so I do not know how much sense it would make in the end. Do you have some examples? |
There is Subcat, a language-specific feature, used in a bunch of languages. I don't know how it works in these languages. If it simply marks verbs that take zero, one or two objects, then I agree that it is not very useful. But I have heard that verbs in some languages can be both transitive and intransitive, and change the morphology accordingly. (The language I heard it about was Chukchi, but it does not seem to use the feature in UD.) |
Hi, @AngledLuffa and @Stormur ! In the Hungarian UD, it appears that the Feature «Definite» is used for marking not only the definite article but also verbs. In verbs, the feature has three values: The Erzya, Moksha and Apurinã treebanks also indicate object marking of objects in the features. All three languages have object marking for three persons and two numbers. Hence the features include:
The presence of an independent noun or pronoun is not required, and therefore it is the verbal morphology that provides information indicating transitivity to some extent. Abkhaz seems to use a Trans feature with values |
Hi, @rueter ! Thanks for the overview! I am rather familiar only with the Hungarian "definite" conjugation. I have some on-the-fly considerations about them related to the present issue. This annotation seems rather problematic to me: yet another case where traditional denomination interferes with UD labels. There is no way a value In sum, the current annotation is totally idiosyncratic to Hungarian. As you notice, in the end, it all boils down to observing either explicite object arguments, or markers thereof on the predicate. Transitivity or not of a clause then follows, but no "transitivity" marker is involved. Sticking with Hungarian, a place where one could actually look for "transitivity" markers are the affixes in couples like tanítani 'to teach' / tanulni 'to study'. |
In the Abkhaz treebank, the feature
Stative passives of transitive verbs also keep the feature Trans=Yes. Transitivity of the clause can easily be deduced form the presence of the
I hope this makes sense. |
Hi @Stormur In the Hungarian examples you give: (1) tanítani 'to teach' / (2) tanulni 'to study', both can take an object or not take an object. What other features would you like?
On the one hand, we could look for dependents and assume that the indefinite conjugation without a dependent is intransitive by default, on the other, the definite is always transitive regardless of whether there is a dependent present. @ftyers what do you think? |
Hi! It was a more general consideration. These suffixes seem to relate to valency, so indirectly to transitivity. You have tan-ul- which represents an "intransitive" process of learning, and then the causative tan-ít- 'to make learn = to teach'. Then, the fact that a verb like study can take or develop a direct object with time seems again to stress that what is relevant for transitivity is the argument structure of the clause and that it is moot to mark something aprioristically on the verb. If the marking of transitivity mechanically depends on the detection of dependents, it is not useful (it is contextual annotation). I mean, I do not think it is possible to speak of "intransitive" or "transitive" conjugations. There might be a correlation, though.
If the |
I have to wrap my head around this, but does it mean that the |
Thank you, @Stormur ! My problem with the Hungarian was that both tanít (2a) Jo tanít egy idegen nyelvet. (3a) Jo tanítja ezt a nyelvet. In (1a-1b) we have an intransitive sentence. My question then is whether we should mark the sentences (4a-4b) as Transitive=Yes The explicit object has been elided, but the existence of that object is retained in the verbal conjugation. I can appreciate the reasoning for removing the content «Number[obj]=Plur,Sing» if we know that number is binary for a given language.
In the UD context this is very good and lightens the otherwise packed features column for UD_Erzya at least. |
I would say that a purely, "a priori" semantic annotation of a verb as intransitive or not based on the process it represents is not something we want at the layer of morphosyntactic annotation, certainly not if such intransitivity is not marked in an explicit, regular way (if it ever happens). I could however conceive an additional sentence layer where the transitivty of a whole clause is annotated, but to put this as a morphological marker on a verb is misleading. This is because if When speaking about "processes", in fact, it seems to me we are actually referring to Aktionsart (or lexical aspect), which can be correlated to transitivity (and then we would be interested in annotating Aktionsart to observe how these two feature pattern), but does not implicate its presence or absence. In fact I would say that the data tell us that, given two actors, every process can be represented as a transitive clause, depending on different factors. Therefore I feel it is totally moot to annotate transitivity somewhere if in the end we just look at the presence or absence of given arguments/markers. That said, I see the practical problem of retrieving an |
No, the Trans marker is not necessarily tied to some object or other marker. In most forms in the paradigm of a verb, you can read off the transitivity from the presence of a slot III person/number/gender marker, but, as I pointed out, in stative passives and in potential forms, the argument syntax is changed and isn’t transitive any longer. In theory you could derive this information from the other features ( In contrast to the Hungarian case («tanul», «tanít» used both transitively and intransitively with virtually equal morphology), an Abkhaz verb is either transitive or intransitive in its non-potential non-passive forms, and they exhibit very different morphology. (There are some exceptions of labile verbs (e.g. «write»), but those are shorthands for pairs of intransitive and transitive verbs that share the masdar (which is the dictionary entry form), and again have very different morphology except for the masdar.) In practical terms, in the morphological analyzer, this feature is taken from the lexicon entry of the verb. (Transitivity is regarded as a salient feature in the Abkhaz lexicographic tradition and given for each verb entry.) |
I find really challenging to understand how Caucasian languages work 🙂 In these examples, Also, from observing the features, is it correct to say that Abkhaz expresses potential by means of a passive or impersonal construction? That is, we are translating it with an English transitive clause "you don't know it", but it is actually "it cannot be known by you"? Can also Is homography common also at the level of lemmas? I think we have to understand what it means to "search for transitive verbs", as in this context this seems to be a very Abkhaz-specific, lexical, semantic classification, and so I fear that an apparently very generic, syntactic label as
Does this mean that we can speak of different inflectional classes? So could one envision to use a feature like |
Sorry, yes, there was obviously an error in the examples; I had manually changed a different example. Here is a freshly generated analysis:
Yes, you could characterize the potential as an impersonal construction that could be literally translated as «it cannot be known by you». Intransitive verbs cannot form stative passives (but there are stative verbs that are not derived from transitives). They can however form potentials, e.g. «I cannot stand»:
Here, the argument syntax is not altered. Homography is very common at the level of lemmas. E.g. “a-gará” can mean «to take» (trans.), «to die (of hunger, thirst etc.)» (intr. with indirect object), «to sound, to be heared» (intr.). The former two are etymologially related (hunger takes me -> reinterpreted as: I am taken by hunger), the latter is unrelated. There is much homography across word classes also (often semantically unrelated), and still more homography modulo stress position. I see your point that |
I see now that the |
Are there morphological features for verbs that have an intransitive vs transitive morphology?
For example, this comes up a lot in Hungarian:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_verbs
It may also be a useful feature in the Sindhi dataset we've been working on with Isra (@muteeurahman), which is why I bring this up
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