Overview

This volume focuses on the relation between theory and description by examining aspects of transitivity in different languages. Transitivity - or case grammar, to use the popular term - has always occupied a centre stage position in linguistics, not least because of its supposedly privileged relation to states of affairs in the real world. Using a systemic functional perspective, the ten papers in this volume focus on the transitivity patterns in language as the expression of the experiential metafunction. Through a study of different languages - English, Dutch, German, Finnish, Chinese and Pitjantjatjara - the contributors provide functional descriptions of the various categories of process, their participants and circumstances, including phenomena such as di-transitivity, causativity, the get-passive, etc. With the relation between theories and descriptions running through the ten chapters of this volume, the chapters point out the nature of the linguistic fact which is linked on the one hand to the nature of the theory and on the other to the speakers' experience of the world in which they live.

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9789027236241

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