Case, Valency and Transitivity

The three concepts of case, valency and transitivity belong to the most discussed topics of modern linguistics. On the one hand, they are crucially connected with morphological aspects of the clause, including case marking, person agreement and voice. On the other hand, they are related to several semantic issues such as the meaning of case, semantico-syntactic verbal classes, and the semantic correlates of transitivity. The volume unifies papers written within different theoretical frameworks and representing variegated approaches (Optimality Theory, Government and Binding, various versions of the Functional approach, Cross-linguistic and Typological analyses), containing both numerous new findings in individual languages and valuable observations and generalizations related to case, valency and transitivity.

Peter M. Arkadiev, Russian Academy of Sciences, in Studies in Language Vol. 33:3 (2009):
The volume ‘Case, Valency and Transitivity’ is a fine collection of papers by authors coming from different countries and belonging to different theoretical frameworks but sharing some fundamental assumptions on what case and transitivity are and how they work, even though these assumptions are often couched in quite different terminology and illustrated by very different data. The book is abundant in very interesting material from a whole array of languages, some of them quite ‘exotic’, and contains valuable contributions to language description, typology, and linguistic theory. The major outcome of this volume, besides the purely empirical one, consists, in my opinion, in clearly showing that the interaction and collaboration of linguists working on different aspects of a single notional domain and approaching it from divergent perspectives may be very fruitful.