An investigation into the interaction between intentionality and the use of transitive/ intransitive expression: A contrastive study of Japanese and Marathi

Abstract

The phenomenon of cross-linguistic variation in the linguistic encoding of accidental events has attracted attention of linguists (Alfonso 1971; DeLancey 1985; Hinds 1986, among others) as well as psychologists (Fausey, Long, Inamori & Boroditsky 2010; Fausey & Boroditsky 2011). Accidental events rank lower than intentional events on the continuum of transitivity proposed by Hopper and Thompson (1980). Pardeshi (2002), and Pardeshi and Horie (2005) demonstrate that in Marathi (an Indo-Aryan language spoken in India) accidental events are typically encoded using intransitive verbs in sharp contrast to Japanese. They claim that Japanese is far more liberal than Marathi in terms of permitting transitive encoding of accidental events. For Japanese, Teramura (1982), Ikegami (1982), and Nishimura (1997), among others have also pointed out that Japanese allows transitive encoding of accidental events. With a view to empirically test whether Japanese and Marathi indeed differ in terms of describing an accidental event as claimed by the previous studies, we conducted a pilot study using a non-linguistic stimulus (a video clip depicting an accidental and intentional event) and elicited linguistic responses. The results of our pilot study support the claims made in previous studies that: (i) Japanese allows transitive rendering of accidental events and (ii) transitive encoding of accidental events in Marathi is more restricted than in Japanese.