Valency classes in an areal-typological perspective
Institute for Linguistic studies
Cross-linguistic study of valency classes is an intriguing and complex matter. It is intriguing because it provides wealth of data on universal tendencies, scenarios of historical development and mechanisms of areal diffusion of syntactic patterns. It is complex for a number of reasons, including the lack of any evident basis for cross-linguistic comparison. In my talk I am going to discuss possible approaches to solving these problems. In particular, I will focus on wordlist-based studies of valency. Focusing mainly on languages of Northern Eurasia, I will argue that I argue that valency patterns of individual verbs change relatively fast and are easily transferable in language contact, while the semantic basis of transitivity is more stable, although not entirely uniform across language families.