Transitivity Discord in some Oceanic Languages

Abstract

Some Oceanic languages have clause types that feature intransitive verbs cooccurring with what looks like an object argument. Such constructions are sometimes described as noun incorporation, but there is evidence for two distinct constructions: noun incorporation, and clauses with what I will call transitivity discord, featuring intransitive verbs and object nouns. Such discord constructions have transitive and intransitive features that are manifested on different structural levels and they can be described as showing a mismatch between verb-level and clause-level transitivity. They share features with noun incorporation, but they are structurally different in that the object noun has syntactic independence rather than being part of the verb.

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