CADERNO DE RESUMOS II Congresso Internacional da ... - Unesp

II Congresso Internacional da ABRAPUITransitive X intransitive verbs in EnglishAna Ibaños (PUC-RS)The well known definition of transitivity and intransitivityseen in many grammar books is far from being complete, definiteor even adequate. We can say, following Parsons (1994) thatcertain English word pairs or triples relate their words both logicallyand etymologically in interesting ways. Given examples such as(a)(b)(c)John closes the door (tv)The door closes (iv)The door is closed (adj)Logically speaking, it is possible to see that a transitive formentails an intransitive form whereas the opposite does not follow.Moreover, when an intransitive form is related to an adjectivesuch as (b) and (c) , what is called inchoative in the literature,we must analyse them in such a way that we can distinguishadjectival form from past partiple form of the verb.The present work aims at studying the some of the solutionsgiven to transitivity in terms of events and states. References:Croft,William. Ageometric representation of the aspectual andcausal structure of verbs.(2006) In: http://www.unm.edu/~wcroft/Papers/Aspect-Causal-SDSU.pdf accessed March 2009.Higginbotham et al. Speaking of events. New Yoyr: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000.LePore, Ernest and Brian McLaughlin.Actions andevents:Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson.Oxford:Blackwell,1985.Rappaport Hovav, M. and B. Levin (2001) “An Event StructureAccount of English Resultatives”, Language 77, 766-797.Parsons,T. Events in the Semantics of English. Cambridge,Mass.:MIT Press, 1994153