Three-participant events in the languages of the world: towards a crosslinguistic typology

✍ Scribed by Margetts, Anna; Austin, Peter K

• Book ID: 111934255
• Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 310 KB
• Volume: 45
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0024-3949
• DOI: 10.1515/ling.2007.014

✦ Synopsis

Although one-and two-participant events, as expressed by intransitive and transitive constructions, have been extensively studied from a crosslinguistic perspective, little work has been done on three-participant events and the ways they operate in di¤erent languages. Where there is description and analysis it is typically confined to syntactic three-place predicates ignoring functional equivalent constructions in languages where such events may be realized with other argument configurations. Also, where analysis exists, it is typically limited to those three-participant events that get lexicalized as three-place predicates in English and other well-known languages. In this article, we explore the semantic categories of three-participant events and outline a range of di¤erent strategies for coding them crosslinguistically. We show that, as alternatives to syntactic three-place strategies, there are a variety of constructions that are syntactically two-place but express a third participant by some other means -morphological, syntactic, or pragmatic.