Intransitive Verb - Valency-changing Operations

Valency-changing Operations

The valency of a verb is related to transitivity. Where the transitivity of a verb only considers the objects, the valency of a verb considers all the arguments the verb takes, including both the subject of the verb and all of the objects (of which there are none for an intransitive verb).

It is possible to change the transitivity of a verb, and in so doing to change the valency.

In languages that have a passive voice, a transitive verb in the active voice becomes intransitive in the passive voice. For example, consider the following sentence:

David hugged Mary.

In this sentence, "hugged" is a transitive verb taking "Mary" as its object. The sentence can be passivized with the direct object "Mary" as the grammatical subject as follows:

Mary was hugged.

This shift is called promotion of the object.

The passive-voice construction cannot take an object. The passivized sentence could be continued with the agent:

Mary was hugged by David.

It cannot be continued with a direct object to be taken by "was hugged", For example, it would be ungrammatical to write "Mary was hugged by her daughter" in order to show that Mary and her daughter shared a hug.

Intransitive verbs can be passivized in some languages. In English, intransitive verbs can be used in the passive voice when a prepositional phrase is included, as in, "The houses were lived in by millions of people."

Some languages such as Dutch have an impersonal passive voice that allows for the passivization of an intransitive verb that does not have a prepositional phrase. A sentence such as "The children slept" can be passivized in German to remove the subject. The passivization can occur without a prepositional phrase, as in "The children slept in the bed", which, in English, could become "The bed was slept in by the children."

In languages with ergative–absolutive alignment, the passive voice (where the object of a transitive verb becomes the subject of an intransitive verb) does not make sense, because the noun associated with the intransitive verb is marked as the object, not as the subject. Instead, these often have an antipassive voice. In this context, the subject of a transitive verb is promoted to the "object" of the corresponding intransitive verb. In the context of a nominative–accusative language like English, this promotion is nonsensical because intransitive verbs don't take objects, they take subjects, and so the subject of a transitive verb ("I" in I hug him) is also the subject of the intransitive passive construction (I was hugged by him). But in an ergative–absolutive language like Dyirbal, "I" in the transitive I hug him would take the ergative case, but the "I" in I was hugged would take the absolutive, and so by analogy the antipassive construction more closely resembles *was hugged me. Thus in this example, the ergative is promoted to the absolutive, and the agent (i.e. him), which was formerly marked by the absolutive, is deleted to form the antipassive voice (or is marked in a different way, in the same way that in the English passive voice can still be specified as the agent of the action using by him in I was hugged by him—for example, Dyirbal puts the agent in the dative case, and Basque retains the agent in the absolutive).