Transitivity prominence

This cross-linguistic study of transitivity prominence largely confirms the earlier studies by Tsunoda (1985) and Malchukov (2005) for degrees of transitivity prominence of verb meanings. While these studies were formulated in terms of implicational scales, this paper studies transitivity prominence purely quantitatively and finds decreasing transitivity prominence in the series ‘break’, ‘hit’, ‘see’, ‘search for’, ‘know’, ‘like’ and ‘look at’. For degrees of transitivity prominence of languages, this study does not confirm the earlier opinion that English and similar languages are particularly transitivity- prominent. Many languages seem to make extensive use of transitivity. It seems that languages that make less use of transitive encoding than English (especially having experiencers and oblique objects of various kinds) are salient for linguists, while languages that make more use of transitive encoding have been overlooked. This is understandable, because coding by some kind of oblique case is more remarkable than coding by means of the usual transitive pattern.