Transitivity, Valency, and Voice

This book sets up a consistent theoretical and terminological framework for the study of the phenomena that are commonly subsumed under the terms transitivity, valency, and voice. These three concepts are at the heart of the most basic aspects of clausal structure in any language; however, there is considerable cross-linguistic variation in the constraints on how verbs combine with noun phrases that refer to participants in the event that they denote or to the circumstances of the event. In this book, Denis Creissels explores and accounts for the extent of this cross-linguistic variation, capturing its regularities and examining the historical phenomena that have resulted in the emergence of constructions and markers. The novel framework developed in the book allows similar phenomena to be identified across typologically diverse languages, and facilitates systematic comparison of the manifestations of these phenomena in the grammars of individual languages.

Denis Creissels, Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics, Department of Language Sciences, University of Lyon

Denis Creissels is Professor Emeritus at the University of Lyon. Until his retirement in 2008 he taught general linguistics at the University of Grenoble (1971-1996) and the University of Lyon (1996-2008). His research focuses on linguistic diversity, the description of less-studied languages, and morphosyntactic typology, and he has carried out fieldwork on West African languages (Baule, Manding, Balanta, Soninke, Jóola), Southern Bantu languages (Tswana), and Daghestanian languages (Akhvakh). His many publications include the widely-used Syntaxe génerale. Une introduction typologique (Hermès, 2006).