In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection. Verbs may inflect for grammatical categories such as person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, case, possession, definiteness, politeness, causativity, clusivity, interrogativity, transitivity, valency, polarity, telicity, volition, mirativity, evidentiality, animacy, associativity, pluractionality, and reciprocity. Verbs may also be affected by agreement, polypersonal agreement, incorporation, noun class, noun classifiers, and verb classifiers. Agglutinative and polysynthetic languages tend to have the most complex conjugations albeit some fusional languages such as Archi can also have extremely complex conjugation. Typically the principal parts are the root and/or several modifications of it (stems). All the different forms of the same verb constitute a lexeme, and the canonical form of the verb that is conventionally used to represent that lexeme is called a lemma.
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action, an occurrence, or a state of being. In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. Verbs have tenses: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; future, to indicate that an action will be done.
A transitive verb is a verb that accepts one or more objects. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not have objects. Transitivity is traditionally thought a global property of a clause, by which activity is transferred from an agent to a patient.
In grammar, an intransitive verb does not allow a direct object. This is a distinctive from a transitive verb, which takes one or more objects. The verb property is called transitivity. Intransitive verbs are often identified as those that can't be followed by who or what.
Lexical semantics, is a subfield of linguistic semantics. The units of analysis in lexical semantics are lexical units which include not only words but also sub-words or sub-units such as affixes and even compound words and phrases. Lexical units include the catalogue of words in a language, the lexicon. Lexical semantics looks at how the meaning of the lexical units correlates with the structure of the language or syntax. This is referred to as syntax-semantic interface.
In general linguistics, a labile verb is a verb that can be either transitive or intransitive, and whose subject when intransitive corresponds to its direct object when transitive. Labile verbs are a prominent feature of English, but they also occur in many other languages.
In linguistics, an adjunct is an optional, or structurally dispensable, part of a sentence, clause, or phrase that, if removed or discarded, will not otherwise affect the remainder of the sentence. Example: In the sentence John helped Bill in Central Park, the phrase in Central Park is an adjunct.
In linguistics, a causative is a valency-increasing operation that indicates that a subject either causes someone or something else to do or be something or causes a change in state of a non-volitional event. Normally, it brings in a new argument, A, into a transitive clause, with the original subject S becoming the object O.
In linguistics, word order typology is the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest. The primary word orders that are of interest are
In linguistics, valency or valence is the number of arguments controlled by a predicate, content verbs being typical predicates. Valency is related, though not identical, to subcategorization and transitivity, which count only object arguments – valency counts all arguments, including the subject. The linguistic meaning of valency derives from the definition of valency in chemistry. The valency metaphor appeared first in linguistics in Charles Sanders Peirce's essay "The Logic of Relatives" in 1897, and it then surfaced in the works of a number of linguists decades later in the late 1940s and 1950s. Lucien Tesnière is credited most with having established the valency concept in linguistics. A major authority on the valency of the English verbs is Allerton (1982), who made the important distinction between semantic and syntactic valency.
In modern linguistics, an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose grammatical subject is not a semantic agent. In other words, it does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action of the verb.
An ambitransitive verb is a verb that is both intransitive and transitive. This verb may or may not require a direct object. English has many ambitransitive verbs. Examples include read, break, and understand.
An anticausative verb is an intransitive verb that shows an event affecting its subject, while giving no semantic or syntactic indication of the cause of the event. The single argument of the anticausative verb is a patient, that is, what undergoes an action. One can assume that there is a cause or an agent of causation, but the syntactic structure of the anticausative makes it unnatural or impossible to refer to it directly. Examples of anticausative verbs are break, sink, move, etc.
Lucien Tesnière was a prominent and influential French linguist. He was born in Mont-Saint-Aignan on May 13, 1893. As a maître de conférences in Strasbourg (1924), and later professor in Montpellier (1937), he published many papers and books on Slavic languages. However, his importance in the history of linguistics is based mainly on his development of an approach to the syntax of natural languages that would become known as dependency grammar. He presented his theory in his book Éléments de syntaxe structurale, published posthumously in 1959. In the book he proposes a sophisticated formalization of syntactic structures, supported by many examples from a diversity of languages. Tesnière died in Montpellier on December 6, 1954.
In linguistics, dative shift refers to a pattern in which the subcategorization of a verb can take on two alternating forms, the oblique dative form or the double object construction form. In the oblique dative (OD) form, the verb takes a noun phrase (NP) and a dative prepositional phrase (PP), the second of which is not a core argument.
In linguistics, a resultative is a form that expresses that something or someone has undergone a change in state as the result of the completion of an event. Resultatives appear as predicates of sentences, and are generally composed of a verb, a post-verbal noun phrase and a so-called resultative phrase which may be represented by an adjective, a prepositional phrase, or a particle, among others. For example, in the English sentence The man wiped the table clean, the adjective clean denotes the state achieved by the table as a result of the event described as the man wiped.
Pluractionality, or verbal number, if not used in its aspectual sense, is a grammatical device that indicates that the action or participants of a verb is/are plural. This differs from frequentative or iterative aspects in that the latter have no implication for the number of participants of the verb.
In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments. When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, the verb is said to be in the passive voice. Voice is sometimes called diathesis.
In linguistics, subcategorization denotes the ability/necessity for lexical items to require/allow the presence and types of the syntactic arguments with which they co-occur. The notion of subcategorization is similar to the notion of valency, although the two concepts stem from different traditions in the study of syntax and grammar.
In linguistics, causative alternation is a phenomenon in which certain verbs that express a change of state can be used transitively or intransitively. A causatively alternating verb, such as "open", has both a transitive meaning and an intransitive meaning. When causatively alternating verbs are used transitively they are called causatives since, in the transitive use of the verb, the subject is causing the action denoted by the intransitive version. When causatively alternating verbs are used intransitively, they are referred to as anticausatives or inchoatives because the intransitive variant describes a situation in which the theme participant undergoes a change of state, becoming, for example, "opened".
