Bob,

I was trying to start with a position that was "agnostic" about whether
those two versions of 'sleep' are the same or not. We can take a
distribution like that and then develop hypotheses about what causes the
distribution -- and that's both necessary in linguistics and thoroughly
normal -- but we just have to remember those are hypotheses, not
observations themselves. 

Saying that a given verb can be transitive or not is a perfectly good
way to approach the issue, but then, so is saying that clauses are
transitive or not, and that particular verbs are more or less associated
with particular clause types. "The professor's lecture ______ the
class," for example, could be seen as a kind of causative frame, and the
use of "sleep" in it as a nonce association of the verb with a frame
it's not normally used with (and, of course, one could instead view that
use of "sleep" as an example of nonce conversion of an intransitive stem
to a transitive one). I was trying to argue that other options are
workable, not that the verb-based one is unworkable. Other choices the
analyst makes about how to treat things may rule out some otherwise
workable options, but that doesn't rule them out in approaches that use
different choices. 

Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University 


-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robert Yates
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2008 11:23 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Transitivity vs Intransitivity - The Linguists' Version
ofHazing?

Bill,

I don't understand your probablity account, especially with regard to
your two examples of sleep.

Bill writes:
 
When you look at a large number of examples of sentences using a given
verb, whan you find, in terms of "+/- use of a direct object," is a
probability distribution. "Sleep" is rarely used with a direct object,
*but it can be* (I've heard students say things like, "That lecture
slept the whole class") -- the probability distribution is thus
something like 99.99999% intrans. vs. 0.00001% trans, or even more
assymmetric. With a verb like "run," the distribution will be more
symmetric. Traditional grammar makes an argument move that says,
roughly, "verbs don't _really_ having varying probabilities of use;
instead, each verb has exactly one use, and what looks like variation is
either due to homonymy, or the kind of language play that does not call
for any formal explanation."

****
If I understand this correctely (and I may not have), then the passage
above says the "sleep" in sentences 1 and 2 are the same.

1) The class slept.
2) The lecture slept the class.

Causative constructions in English are hard to learn.  There is evidence
that sentences like (2) are created by children.  

However, (1) and (2) have different meanings for me.   (1) has no sense
of causation; (2) clearly has that.  

Likewise, in sentences (3) and (4) "run" has very different meanings.

3)  Barry ran.
4) Barry ran a good campaign.  

Dictionaries are very interesting in this regard.  They provide
different meanings for verbs and indentify which meaning of a verb is
transitive or intransitive.  Why is this wrongheaded?

Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri 

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