Low transitivity across passive-like structures in Spanish and French
(2021) 17th International Pragmatics Conference — Location: Winterthur (27.June.2021)
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- Abstract
- Various researchers (Halliday 1996, Hopper & Thompson 1980, Quesada 1998, Helasvuo 2001, Naess 2007) have studied the notion of transitivity and demonstrated its primordial role in syntactic and usage-based studies. Nevertheless, very few studies have examined the relation between transitivity and agent defocusing. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring how the degree of transitivity impacts the characteristics of a series of impersonal constructions in English, French and Spanish. More precisely, I concentrate on low transitivity clauses in passive constructions based on a reflexive pronoun, man-impersonals, numeral-based indefinite pronouns, non-anaphoric third person plurals and periphrastic passives. Analyzing corpus-based data from oral and written modes formal and from informal registers, I aim to evaluate the potential impact of transitivity on the behavior of passive-like structures across the three languages, with a special focus on the type of verb process. When applying Hopper and Thompson’s model of ten components to distinguish low from high transitivity clauses, preliminary results show that few occurrences of impersonal constructions possess all the characteristics of a true low transitive clause. The selection of data thus comprises low transitivity occurrences including from 0 to 3 of the ten transitive features listed by Hopper and Thompson (1980). The overall distribution of impersonal structures shows that among the complete set of impersonal constructions studied 4,7% of the data fulfill the low transitivity requirements. A closer examination reveals the following elements. Preliminary results show that across the three languages, French is the one to resort the most to impersonal constructions low in transitivity, especially the man-impersonal. Findings also indicate that low transitivity impersonal mechanisms are more specific of the oral mode as they account for 69% of the data, with a preponderant use in informal oral productions. Zooming in on these data, with a focus on the type of verb process, impersonal constructions exhibit a general tendency for mental and relational verbs which are commonly used to support speakers’ intersubjective perspective. While the extensive use of mental verbs could be observed in the three languages, relational verbs seems to be more specific to French. Since low transitivity impersonal constructions were mainly found in conversational situations, this observed extensive use of relational and mental verbs is in line with the fact that language production is about ‘how things are from our perspective’, a specificity of day to day pragmatics of interactional situations highlighted by Hopper & Thompson (2001:53). As for the distribution of the type of process per language the following patterns emerged. While French preferentially resorts to mental and relational verbs, Spanish displays a marked preference for mental verbs. English is the language that resorts the least to low transitivity constructions. In conclusion, when analyzing impersonal constructions with a special focus on low transitivity clauses, it can be suggested that the degree of transitivity, the languages and the mode/register variation are key factors and may impact on their characteristics and, more precisely, on the type of verb process used in the clause.
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Citations
Pierre, E. (2021). Low transitivity across passive-like structures in Spanish and French. 17th International Pragmatics Conference, Winterthur. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/107611