Re: prohibitions

From: Micheal Palmer (mwpalmer@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Mar 26 1997 - 00:51:14 EST


At 2:28 PM -0500 3/25/97, Mari Broman Olsen wrote:

>As a teaser (and link to previous discussions about the middle), I can
>offer that Hopper and Thompson's article on "Transitivity in grammar
>and discourse" notes that the negative tends to co-vary with
>INtransitivity in languages. That is, in languages that mark
>(in)transitivity and negatives morphologically, syntactically, or
>semantically (that's a hard one to explain in a short msg, but they
>include it), negatives, if they co-vary regularly with transitivity,
>will appear with the intransitive morphological marking.

Huh? I'm not following very well. I'm sure that's because I didn't get
enough sleep last night, and *not* because your note lacks clarity, :-) but
would you mind elaborating a little on the part of your message I've quoted
above? [It's not the part on semantic marking that puzzles me. I am just
not clear on how transitivity and negatives might co-vary.]

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Micheal W. Palmer
Religion & Philosophy
Meredith College

mwpalmer@earthlink.net
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