Thoughts on Transitivity

The nature of the grammatical relationships of incorporation, subordination, predication, and commentary is outlined. Examples are given of languages which use incorporation and subordination as the basic tools in forming sentences, usually together with existential particles. Other languages prefer nominal predication or commentary as the basic sentence type. Such languages as those mentioned above do not possess the category of transitivity. Examples follow of languages which have developed transitivity (and active and passive verbal genera). A signal that a language is becoming transitive is the separation of actants from possessives and incorporations. Chinese is cited as a language which in its earliest known form was on the way from an ergative type (without transitivity) to an agentive type (with emerging transitivity). The full transitive construction (agent, verb, patient) is of a totally different nature from subordination and predication, whose job it is to furnish the statements of the types denoting "which is" and "is". Transitivity has to do with "does" and "done" together with "who, whom, what, by whom, by what" without anything in the basic structure owning anything or being equated to anything.