One of my major weaknesses has been remembering which is which when coming to transitive/intransitive pairs. Looking for help, I came across this page, which I found on an exhaustive listing of word pairs on Jim Breen's site:

http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/...MPq0e.html

It explains a LOT about Japanese verbs I never knew. I suddenly feel like I understand a lot more than I did just a few minutes ago.

This is the page I found the link on, also useful in its own right:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/ti_list.html

rich_f Wrote:One of my major weaknesses has been remembering which is which when coming to transitive/intransitive pairs. Looking for help, I came across this page, which I found on an exhaustive listing of word pairs on Jim Breen's site:

http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/...MPq0e.html

It explains a LOT about Japanese verbs I never knew. I suddenly feel like I understand a lot more than I did just a few minutes ago.

This is the page I found the link on, also useful in its own right:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/ti_list.html

Thanks. That sounds useful. I may included that information in my deck xD.

There are some mistakes on that page, though --預かる is a transitive verb, it's not a pair with 預ける, for instance.

I thought they were a transitive/ditransitive pair?

[s0apgun]

I think this confused me more than anything, lol.

I had an episode of fascination with Japanese verb transitivity a couple months ago, and there's a quite a lot of juicy info out there. Here's a couple of big ones:

Transitive and Intransitive Constructions in Japanese and English: A Psycholinguistic Study by a Zoe Pei-sui Luk, and

The Acquisition of Japanese Intransitive and Transitive Paired Verbs by English-Speaking Learners

Seriously, they're worth reading and putting into an incremental reading deck. I think they're quite insightful. Here are some points that I think are useful:

- In English, the intransitive-transitive distinction doesn't exist morphologically (well, less than a dozen pairs exist in common use), so we've got to spend time farmiliarising ourselves with it, and early.

- English-speaking students of Japanese find it easier to acquire the use of the transitive verb forms because they are familiar with transitive verbs and not so familiar with intransitive verbs: the use of intransitive verbs is actually a feature of Japanese and a point of difference between Japanese and English.

Passages from the 2nd study:

Quote:Students find it difficult to learn these paired verbs because there are too many morphological patterns to derive. Rules for derivation do exist, but are too numerous to be systematised.

I remember reading this before, after discovering the airnet link and thinking, "ahh but you seeee now..." haha. Makes it much less intimidating.

The researchers went through several Japanese grammar textbooks and found:

Quote:There were 611 (82.2 percent) transitive verbs with no paired intransitive verbs, 78 (10.5 percent) transitive verbs with paired intransitive verbs, and only 54 (7.3 percent) intransitive verbs with no paired transitive verbs. Together, these transitive verbs with/without paired intransitive verbs accounted for 92.7 percent of the total number of verbs

In other words, textbooks use way too many transitive verbs, so you'll have a hard time getting farmiliar with how Japanese use intransitive constructions unless you find better resources. Core2k6k keeps a pretty good balance, for example, but there's not enough pairs. I think there was about 80 when I checked.

The researchers show that students around N1-level can identify a verb's transitive status correctly at least 75% of the time. Any lower and it goes downhill quickly. N3-level students can identify transitivity only 33-40% of the time.

Particularly useful to know is that Japanese prefers describing events intransitively, unless one wants to emphasise an agent or one's own responsibility for an action or event taking place, in which case Japanese will prefer using a transitive construction.

Even more interesting (but less useful) is that Japanese intransitive verbs can imply agents! WAT. Luk calls them agent-implying intransitive verbs. Understanding this alone is probably worth reading the whole thing.

For example, 掴まる 'to be caught' is an intransitive verb in Japanese, and the action of catching or being caught clearly requires an agent, but it's still intransitive. How?

Well, while it does imply an agent (and Japanese are aware of course that the action of catching or being caught requires an agent), any potential presence of an agent is defocused regardless! So it's actually a subjective choice of focus in the mind of Japanese speakers, something that can't be derived from the semantics of the verb! It's how English and Japanese differ in their habitual approach to interpreting situations. A Japanese speaker's "situation model" (in other words, what's going on in their head) would be focused on the change of state after the punctual act.

So if we take the sentence 犯人が掴まった 'the criminal was caught', the idea of causality - such as a police officer catching the criminal - is typically overlooked. Weird, huh? So it's more like 'the criminal is in a state of having already been caught, I guess they're in prison now or something......................................................... hmm, I wonder who caught him, probably a police officer, I think I saw one go-*drifts off into other thoughts*'. This is me trying to paraphrase lol.

Nice summary:

"Kageyama (1996), for example, discussed a super-event (x ACT on y) and a sub-event (y BECOME STATE z), and claims that English views an event from the perspective of a causer, taking the super-event as the basic and extending it to the resultative state of the patient, as illustrated in Figure 7. Japanese, in contrast, views the event from the perspective of the patient that undergoes changes, taking the sub-event as the basic and gradually extending attention to result and the causation, as shown in Figure 8."

yudantaiteki Wrote:There are some mistakes on that page, though --預かる is a transitive verb, it's not a pair with 預ける, for instance.

Yeah, if you look on Jim Breen's page, he made a note of that:

Quote:預かる [あずかる]
(v5r,vt) to keep in custody; to receive on deposit; to take charge of {NB: this allocation to Intransitive by Takasugi is dubious.}

I found a more thorough explanation in "An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics," by Natsuko Tsujimura at pp. 143-153. (ISBN: 978-1-4051-1065-5)

Essentially, some verb stems are changed from trans to intrans by going from -u to -ar-u; others are changed from intrans to trans by changing the verb form from -u to -as-u/-os-u; and a third group has its own rules. (It's called "polarized.")

The polarized group has two verb stems with two different endings, so you can't really put it in the first two baskets.

And like any rule, there are myriad exceptions, but it'll help me a bit.

I think.

EDIT: The breakdown comes from a study by Okuda (1995), and previous research by Haspelmath (1993).

Animosophy Wrote:Even more interesting (but less useful) is that Japanese intransitive verbs can imply agents! WAT. Luk calls them agent-implying intransitive verbs. No other language is known to share this perculiarity.

There must be verbs like that in Finnish. Now, to find an example...

Löytyi! { third person singular past tense of 'löytyä' - 'to be found' }

Oh I see now I feel like I've lost something special, haha.

Thanks for pointing it out I'll have to read through my notes again to figure out what it was that is unique about Japanese grammar, there was something!

Edit: haHA!

Japanese is the only language known to make no morphographical distinction between the progressive and perfective resultative aspect! [verb]-ている is used to represent both of these distinct grammatical categories.

御飯が焦げている。

The rice is burning. ― progressive
The rice is burnt. ― perfective resultative

For this particular example, the possibility of either interpretation is 50/50 according to this study: http://homepage3.nifty.com/park/aspect.htm

I remember reading a case study of a Japanese child concerned with the acquisition of v-ている and it seems native children pick this up perfectly well. It's pretty obvious what is meant in most cases through context.

I was too hasty there, don't want to be responsible for speading misinformation!

I don't think that the link got the English transitive/ intransitive pairs right though... drank and drench have completely different meanings, and so do sit and set. I'd consider myself well read, and I have never come across anything that would make me consider those two as pairs.

Animosophy Wrote:Japanese is the only language known to make no morphographical distinction between the progressive and perfective aspect! [verb]-ている is used to represent both of these distinct grammatical categories.

御飯が焦げている。

The rice is burning. ― progressive
The rice is burnt. ― perfective

I've never seen that described as "perfective"; usually perfective is 焦げた. The ている form is a realized state but it's still a state in progress or having some effect in the context.

Ah, I've always called it "resultative", and I think you're right. This isn't going well for me, lol.

I'm afraid of going into a subject that I'm unqualified to discuss but I hope this offers some clarity to anyone interested about the use of ている.

This is a list of sentences from Matsuo Soga's "Tense and Aspect in Modern Colloquial Japanese". In the diagrams, S stands for speech time, R for reference time, E for event time, and the dotted line is to show the relevancy of past event E at the time of R.

It helps learners visualise the focus of tense and aspect markers inc. -te iru. It's one of the resources I've found most helpful.




So, going back to the previous example...

御飯が焦げている。 'The rice is burnt', the event time (the rice getting burnt) would have occurred in the past, but cannot be described as perfective because it is relevant to the time of speaking and thus the focus is not on the completion of the verb but the resultative state. "Resultative" is much better

I might've completely derailed the thread here, but please, don't mind me D:

Wow, that is a really helpful chart! Thank you!!^^

ktcgx Wrote:I don't think that the link got the English transitive/ intransitive pairs right though... drank and drench have completely different meanings, and so do sit and set. I'd consider myself well read, and I have never come across anything that would make me consider those two as pairs.

No, drench actually *is* a transitive verb when it means "to force to drink." (The OED says so.) It isn't something that I'd call common these days, but it was common from the 11th-19th centuries. Being the oldest recorded meaning, it goes first in the list of definitions. That's probably why that guy listed it as drink/drench.

Going down the list of definitions, drench is also an intransitive verb, and again transitive, and again intransitive, depending solely on the meaning.

English can be cruel sometimes.

Back on topic:

This list here:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/ti_list.html

is pretty well done, too.

Jim Breen did a good job of breaking the verb pairs into 5 groups (instead of 4) to make them slightly easier to remember. He added the group of verbs that don't seem to follow any rule at all for transitivity/intransitivity, which is also useful to know.

As an RTK "graduate," I'm all for breaking things down into easier to remember chunks.

Now I just need to take these lists and compare them with what's likely fodder for the N1...

One last link: see 70 trans/intrans verb pairs in Flash animation:

http://www.mlcjapanese.co.jp/Download/Ji...0Pairs.swf

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...6#pid52606

Animosophy Wrote:I had an episode of fascination with Japanese verb transitivity a couple months ago, and there's a quite a lot of juicy info out there. Here's a couple of big ones:

Transitive and Intransitive Constructions in Japanese and English: A Psycholinguistic Study by a Zoe Pei-sui Luk, and

The Acquisition of Japanese Intransitive and Transitive Paired Verbs by English-Speaking Learners

Seriously, they're worth reading and putting into an incremental reading deck. I think they're quite insightful. Here are some points that I think are useful:

- In English, the intransitive-transitive distinction doesn't exist morphologically (well, less than a dozen pairs exist in common use), so we've got to spend time farmiliarising ourselves with it, and early.

- English-speaking students of Japanese find it easier to acquire the use of the transitive verb forms because they are familiar with transitive verbs and not so familiar with intransitive verbs: the use of intransitive verbs is actually a feature of Japanese and a point of difference between Japanese and English.

Passages from the 2nd study:

Quote:Students find it difficult to learn these paired verbs because there are too many morphological patterns to derive. Rules for derivation do exist, but are too numerous to be systematised.

I remember reading this before, after discovering the airnet link and thinking, "ahh but you seeee now..." haha. Makes it much less intimidating.

The researchers went through several Japanese grammar textbooks and found:

Quote:There were 611 (82.2 percent) transitive verbs with no paired intransitive verbs, 78 (10.5 percent) transitive verbs with paired intransitive verbs, and only 54 (7.3 percent) intransitive verbs with no paired transitive verbs. Together, these transitive verbs with/without paired intransitive verbs accounted for 92.7 percent of the total number of verbs

In other words, textbooks use way too many transitive verbs, so you'll have a hard time getting farmiliar with how Japanese use intransitive constructions unless you find better resources. Core2k6k keeps a pretty good balance, for example, but there's not enough pairs. I think there was about 80 when I checked.

The researchers show that students around N1-level can identify a verb's transitive status correctly at least 75% of the time. Any lower and it goes downhill quickly. N3-level students can identify transitivity only 33-40% of the time.

Particularly useful to know is that Japanese prefers describing events intransitively, unless one wants to emphasise an agent or one's own responsibility for an action or event taking place, in which case Japanese will prefer using a transitive construction.

Even more interesting (but less useful) is that Japanese intransitive verbs can imply agents! WAT. Luk calls them agent-implying intransitive verbs. Understanding this alone is probably worth reading the whole thing.

For example, 掴まる 'to be caught' is an intransitive verb in Japanese, and the action of catching or being caught clearly requires an agent, but it's still intransitive. How?

Well, while it does imply an agent (and Japanese are aware of course that the action of catching or being caught requires an agent), any potential presence of an agent is defocused regardless! So it's actually a subjective choice of focus in the mind of Japanese speakers, something that can't be derived from the semantics of the verb! It's how English and Japanese differ in their habitual approach to interpreting situations. A Japanese speaker's "situation model" (in other words, what's going on in their head) would be focused on the change of state after the punctual act.

So if we take the sentence 犯人が掴まった 'the criminal was caught', the idea of causality - such as a police officer catching the criminal - is typically overlooked. Weird, huh? So it's more like 'the criminal is in a state of having already been caught, I guess they're in prison now or something......................................................... hmm, I wonder who caught him, probably a police officer, I think I saw one go-*drifts off into other thoughts*'. This is me trying to paraphrase lol.

Nice summary:

"Kageyama (1996), for example, discussed a super-event (x ACT on y) and a sub-event (y BECOME STATE z), and claims that English views an event from the perspective of a causer, taking the super-event as the basic and extending it to the resultative state of the patient, as illustrated in Figure 7. Japanese, in contrast, views the event from the perspective of the patient that undergoes changes, taking the sub-event as the basic and gradually extending attention to result and the causation, as shown in Figure 8."

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/6871/a4yg.png

Thanks for this. I've been on a similar kick recently - realizing that this is a perpetual weakness for me, and looking for ways to "solve it once and for all". The 2nd link above is particularly good. I'm glad to see that it's not just me who has this problem!

rich_f Wrote:One of my major weaknesses has been remembering which is which when coming to transitive/intransitive pairs. Looking for help, I came across this page, which I found on an exhaustive listing of word pairs on Jim Breen's site:

http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/...MPq0e.html

It explains a LOT about Japanese verbs I never knew. I suddenly feel like I understand a lot more than I did just a few minutes ago.

This is the page I found the link on, also useful in its own right:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/ti_list.html

I'm a bit puzzled by the analysis. Look at the first item. (Azukeru vs. azukaru). They both end in "る" but per the table they are analyzed as "azuke-ru vs. "azukar-u". I thought る was always to be analyzed as "ru".

Come to think of it, this data uses romaji to explain an aspect of Japanese. I thought the use of romaji was frowned upon (at least by the more militant kananists).

My old posts are so embarrassing to read. Damn it.

john555 Wrote:Come to think of it, this data uses romaji to explain an aspect of Japanese. I thought the use of romaji was frowned upon (at least by the more militant kananists).

Linguistic texts, are almost entirely written in romanization, no matter the source language.

Here's a thread from about 4 years ago that ends up discussing romanization in comprehensive grammars for linguists.
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=5339

john555 Wrote:I'm a bit puzzled by the analysis. Look at the first item. (Azukeru vs. azukaru). They both end in "る" but per the table they are analyzed as "azuke-ru vs. "azukar-u". I thought る was always to be analyzed as "ru".

The stem of 預ける ends in け:
預ける
預けます
預けない
預けさせる
預けて
預けた
...

The stem of 預かる ends in r:

預かる
預かります
預からない
預からせる
預かって // I forget what this phenomenom is called, but I believe the っ was formerly り
預かった
...

john555 Wrote:I'm a bit puzzled by the analysis. Look at the first item. (Azukeru vs. azukaru). They both end in "る" but per the table they are analyzed as "azuke-ru vs. "azukar-u". I thought る was always to be analyzed as "ru".

Come to think of it, this data uses romaji to explain an aspect of Japanese. I thought the use of romaji was frowned upon (at least by the more militant kananists).

Why won't you do yourself a favour and get a decent grammar reference (like "Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar") so you are not "puzzled by someone else's analysis"?

FWIW, that dictionary I'm talking about classifies verbs according to their ない-form to:

- あ「五|上一」 group (ない-form stems end with あ sound, ex.: 書かない, 飲まない, 作らない)
- え「下一」 group (ない-form stems end with い or え sound, ex.: 教えない, 起きない)

plus two exceptions:
する
来る

Inny Jan Wrote:

john555 Wrote:I'm a bit puzzled by the analysis. Look at the first item. (Azukeru vs. azukaru). They both end in "る" but per the table they are analyzed as "azuke-ru vs. "azukar-u". I thought る was always to be analyzed as "ru".

Come to think of it, this data uses romaji to explain an aspect of Japanese. I thought the use of romaji was frowned upon (at least by the more militant kananists).

Why won't you do yourself a favour and get a decent grammar reference (like "Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar") so you are not "puzzled by someone else's analysis"?

FWIW, that dictionary I'm talking about classifies verbs according to their ない-form to:

- あ「五|上一」 group (ない-form stems end with あ sound, ex.: 書かない, 飲まない, 作らない)
- え「下一」 group (ない-form stems end with い or え sound, ex.: 教えない, 起きない)

plus two exceptions:
する
来る

I have NO PROBLEM with using romaji to analyze Japanese grammar (or learn it or teach it). In fact I prefer it. I was being sarcastic in my post because in the past various people on this forum have jumped all over me for preferring to use romaji (at least in the early stages).

Yes, I have Japanese grammars. But I've never seen a word analyzed as azukar-u because Japanese syllables never end in a final "r". It does raise a question, how would a native Japanese linguist analyze "azukar-u" using kana?

john555 Wrote:It does raise a question, how would a native Japanese linguist analyze "azukar-u" using kana?

Have you read what Vempele wrote? I'm not a native Japanese linguist but I would bet that this would the way they would explain phenomena like "azukar-u".

Inny Jan Wrote:

john555 Wrote:It does raise a question, how would a native Japanese linguist analyze "azukar-u" using kana?

Have you read what Vempele wrote? I'm not a native Japanese linguist but I would bet that this would the way they would explain phenomena like "azukar-u".

I did read what Vempele wrote, and I still don't see the "stem" ending in "r". Is this "stem" a theoretical construct just for linguistic discussion?

You say "phenomena like 'azukar-u'". What phenomena? In transcribing Japanese into romaji and dividing into syllables, is it not "a-zu-ka-ru"?