Creissels's typology of transitivity, valency and voice #

The nominal terms of a clause bear transitivity-related roles defined by coding rather than by meaning: A and P are the two terms coded like the agent and the patient of a prototypical transitive verb; S is the term of an intransitive clause coded like the sole argument of monovalent verbs; every other nominal term is an oblique, a dative oblique where recipients are coded apart from patients. A construction of a verb assigns each of the verb's potential participants a nominal term with one of these roles, leaves it implied but unexpressed, or has it outside participant structure altogether, and a valency alternation is a relation between two constructions of the same verb. Where verbal morphology marks the alternation it is a voice alternation and the morphologically simpler, or semantically unmarked, construction is the initial one; where nothing marks it the verb is flexivalent, and a change of transitivity without marking is ambitransitivity. Two operations characterise oriented alternations: nucleativization, a participant that is not a core term of the initial construction becomes one, and denucleativization, a core term of the initial construction is not one of the derived construction, whether it remains implied or is suppressed from participant structure. The main types are defined from them. Passivization, its impersonal variant, antipassivization and S-denucleativization denucleativize one core term without suppressing it and nucleativize nothing; decausativization suppresses the initial A; an A-nucleativization makes a new participant the A or S and codes the initial A or S as P or denucleativizes it, whether the new participant is a causer, causativization in the narrow sense, an instrument, or a concernee; reflexivization and reciprocalization cumulate two participant roles in one S; applicativization keeps the initial A or S and adds an applied phrase, as P, as a dative or as an ordinary oblique, for a participant the initial construction could not code that way; portative derivation makes the initial S the A of a transitive construction whose P is a carried entity. Nucleativization is not valency increase, since a participant may be nucleativized while another is denucleativized. One marker commonly codes several types, and markers may stack compositionally, the composite alternation being the composition of its parts, subject to language-particular restrictions and non-compositional readings. Symmetrical voices, the pivot-prominent systems of Western Austronesian and of a few languages elsewhere, select a participant as pivot without nucleativizing or denucleativizing anything and so fall outside the typology. Transitive and intransitive constructions align in coding, S coded like A or like P, and the Obligatory Coding Principle, one coding assigned by every verb to one of its participants, reformulates the accusative and ergative types as obligatory A-coding and obligatory P-coding, which split-S languages violate. The book's examples are the rows of Data/Examples/Creissels2024.json.

Implementation notes #

A construction over a finite type of potential participants sends each to a status: a nominal term with the substrate's transitivity-related role, a dative oblique, implied but unexpressed, or absent from participant structure. Statuses record coding, so the sole P-coded term of an impersonal construction keeps the status P although the clause has no A. The alternation types are predicates on pairs of constructions, with the nucleativized or applied participant as a parameter where the definition singles one out. The semantic conditions that separate causativization from the A-nucleativization of an instrument or a concernee, or reflexivization from reciprocalization, are not modelled: the three A-nucleativizations are one predicate and the rows carry the book's label.
The substrate's summary records of the alternation types, indexed by the fate of the initial A, P and S, are not redefined: a record describes a pair of constructions when the fates computed from the pair agree with its fields, and the book's defining example of each type is shown to be described by the corresponding record.
Stacking is composition of relations, and valency is the number of nuclear participants.
Alignment and the Obligatory Coding Principle are stated over the flagging of S in the book's intransitive examples; the book's principle ranges over every verb's coding frame, and its examples also show indexation.

TODO #

Chapters 2 to 7 on participant coding, transitivity prominence, impersonal constructions and trivalent verbs, and chapters 9 to 17 beyond their definitions, are not modelled.
The potential-participant condition on nucleativization, which excludes the Yupik believer derivation from voice; inflectional and equipollent voice systems; the non-compositional readings of stacked markers; and the diachronic scenarios are prose.
The substrate's records fix an intransitive base for causativization and an intransitive derived construction for passivization and antipassivization, which the Balinese causative (51), the Tswana passive (38f) and the Nahuatl antipassive (39c) do not have; the records describe the defining examples only.

Creissels's typology of transitivity, valency and voice #

Implementation notes #

TODO #

References #

Constructions and transitivity-related roles (§1.3) #

Nucleativization and denucleativization (§8.1.3) #

The main types of voice alternation (§8.3) #

The substrate's summary records #

Alignment and the Obligatory Coding Principle (§1.3.4) #

The book's examples #

Symmetrical voice systems (§8.5) #