My semester has been mainly composed of contemplating transitivity, and by contemplating I mean beating my head against the wall and the table because I can't think of the words I want to. My current problem is that I want to write about wacked out transitivity alternations for my sociolinguistics paper, but I can't really think of any, but my brain tells me that they are out there somewhere. So last night I sat in the livingroom staring into space and writing down lists of words that basically read like this:
it makes
it takes
on the make
make it
...
yeah, I have a feeling that there is something in some dialect that turns a transitive verb into an intransitive verb. I mean, there are things like "I drove (a car)" and "I gave (money, i.e. donated)" and "I bought (stocks)" and those have an understood object, but those aren't non-standard. I want to find something like that that is used only in non-standard dialects. Like if "I made" meant "I made pie" . . . or something, if "she watches" meant "she watches television." Kind of like you can say "I wash" and you mean dishes, in a certain context: "I washed, she rinsed, he dried." But I guess the fact that it has an understood object means it is still transitive. Which ruins that theory completely. I guess I am thinking of verbs switching from straight transitive to something like "eat" where they can be transitive or intransitive. But then there are verbs like "lay" that switch completely, "I laid the dress on the bed" vs. "I laid on the bed." and "raise" "I raised the flag" "The bread raised." (I just want to note here, on this topic, that I once almost convinced a group of people that the past tense of dive is "dave".) So what I am thinking of does exist to an extent. There's also the alternation in Pittsburghese where "leave" means "let" and "let" means "leave", examples stolen from Wikipedia: "Leave him go outside”; “Let the book on the table.” So that's something too. Really, I just love love love non-standard verbs. I want to used them all.
(hmm, that was a typo there, but I'm just going to leave it. It fits.)
But isn't "I laid on the bed" incorrect? Aren't the principle parts of lie, lay, had lain? Does one ever "laid" itself down? Does it only DO that to something else?
Posted by: sperlonga at February 22, 2007 11:29 AMAs a baker, I always heard "the bread rose"
Posted by: Chantel at February 22, 2007 7:17 PMbut, yeah, for the "laid" ones, I meant to write "lay" that's the example I was going for. I was just writing fast.
Posted by: linnea at February 23, 2007 2:24 PMWhen I spent a time in Mentone working at a hardware store customers would come in and I'd ask them what they did. Time after time, they would say, "Oh, I draw." Turns out this regionalism means "I receive a welfare check from the government."
Posted by: Barb at February 25, 2007 8:19 PMoh, see, yeah! that's what I was thinking of, I love things like that.
Posted by: linnea at February 26, 2007 8:21 AM