Morphosyntax Constructions of the World's Languages

A predication prototypically predicates an event. Events have multiple participants in their semantic frame. Some participants are more central than others. The information packaging of event participants construes certain participants as core arguments and others as oblique arguments. Transitivity constructions are defined in terms of the prototypical expression of central participants as core argument phrases. ‘Subject’ and ‘object’ are defined crosslinguistically in terms of degree of topicality (salience) and force dynamics (subject acting on object). Basic argument encoding strategies are flagging, indexation, and word order. An exemplar approach to defining transitive constructions is taken, using the agentive change of state event of breaking as the exemplar event, following Haspelmath. Subject generally precedes verb and object in word order. Variation in alignment is based on the system of transitive and intransitive constructions, in terms of which core argument of the transitive construction the intransitive argument aligns with, including the rare case where the core arguments of intransitive constructions are split between transitive subject and object.