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/message/jpnEUwEoW7XEUhMPq0e.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

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.

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

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.

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.}

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.

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

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.

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

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/message/jpnEUwEoW7XEUhMPq0e.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

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).

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".

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).

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

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

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".