Talk:Transitivity (grammatical category)
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I'm not familiar with Hungarian, but that distinction doesn't seem to be a clear-cut transitivity difference. Maybe remove in favour of a better example? Slac speak up! 07:18, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
- Thank You for the concern, possibly helping to improve the article. I admit I am not an expert in linguistics, maybe not even an educated laic. I have learned two Eskimo languages since some years, and Hungarian is my mother tongue, but I am not expert in how concepts like "grammatical category" are defined exactly (lacking even knowledge what we should call "cases" exactly in Hungarian[1][2]).
- As for transitivity, You cannot use a verb in Hungarian without an "agreement"[3] with the definiteness of its object (if any, lack of object counts as indefinite). The exact rules are sophisticated (e.g. if the object is possessed by a possessor, expressed by possessive syntagm, then it counts automatically as definite), but anyay, the distinction appears in the paradigm of the verb in a mandatory way, just like tense or number.
- Eskimo languages have an ergative construct.
- Although transitivity is really sometimes mentioned as a grammatical category,[4][5][6][7] but I admit, I am afraid now that "my" article introduces this concept from a too particular point of view and examples, maybe losing an appropriate general introduction of the concept. I suspect transitivity is a more general concept, used not only for languages which have in which transitivity appears in a mandatory way in the choice of paradigm of the verb. Maybe the article would deserve a template warning of that (I do not know its right name).
- As for Your original question, I did not understand it well. Could You write the details why and how the examples should be changed?
- Physis (talk) 09:23, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
- I have seen just now that You rewrited the article. Thank You very much for that. I find it very probably that my lead text and explanatory texts might be narrow or inappropriate. As for the examples, paradigm tables, it would be a help for me to understand why they are not right here. Maybe then I can help to find better ones (possibly from another Uralic language, or from Siberian Yupik or Sireniki Eskimo). The distinction between transitive and intransitive paradigm of the verb permeates Hungarian language, and is surely mandatory. Physis (talk) 10:03, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
- There is a note mentioning a reference that You have deleted from the bibliography. The note itself is left "broken", I suspect the inconsistency must be resolved, either by deleting also the note (maybe together with the sentence supported by the note), or by reinserting the deleted bibliographical data. I shall wait with this choice till knowing Your answer, because You seem to have a better knowledge of the concept itself, capable of judging better what kind of the details and examples are worth being mentioned. Physis (talk) 10:27, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
