Re: inherent transitivity

Peter T. Daniels kirjoitti:

The concept of traveling involves a traveler, an origin, a goal, a means
of travel, a timespan, etc. How any particular language grammaticalizes
them is irrelevant; the English verb "go" is about as intransitive as
you can get.

I'll probably end up confusing everyone involved, but this reminds of an even nastier terminological muddle also quite recently cooked up.

The term "congruence" was, before the systemic-functionalist linguistics, a perfectly clear term that had a precise use in grammar: two words were in congruence if they shared the same grammatical form, either in some grammatical features or totally. For instance, Finnish /iso talo/ 'a big house' : /iso-n talo-n/ 'of the big house' : /iso-j-en talo-j-en/ 'of the big houses' exemplifies congruence of number and case.

In SFL, by contrast, congruence has come to mean isomorphism between form and meaning according to some criteria never explicitly formulated. For example, the English phrase /the flight of the plane/ is deemed "incongruent" because flying is an "action" and should thus be expressed with a verb in order to be congruent; here the action is nominalised.

But who's to know what is the "correct" expression for any given semantic content? In fact, the whole idea of separating the expression from the content like this seems both oldfashioned and out of touch with current language typology. Is it "correct", "congruent", that 'wind' can be expressed with the verb /tuulla/ in Finnish, or vice versa? And if we know, universally, what is congruent and what is not, isn't it possible to specify the most congruent language of all--the one where semantics and grammar coincide particularly well?

Or should the congruence only be judged language by language, not universally? But even then, who are we, as linguists, to label some totally acceptable and meaningful linguistic expressions as "incongruent", semantically suspect?

The piece of PTD's message above reminded me of this, because I remember Van Valin's Introduction to Syntax having the term "semantic valence" (but of course I may be wrong--it might have been another introductory syntax tome). The idea was to look at the the verb and give the number of its obligatory arguments on the grounds of its *semantics*. But as said in the quote above, in real world terms, any action requires quite a few of semantic features that might never get (obligatorily) expressed in any given language. For example, everything that happens must do so in space and time and with , so are we bound to count LOCATION and TIME as obligatory semantic arguments for each and every verb as well? I think there's something seriously wrong in this.

Sometimes I wonder if all the real problems linguistics have already been solved, as some people seem to spend enormous amounts of time in creating artificial ones instead.

--
..... Tommi Nieminen .... http://www.saunalahti.fi/~tommni/ ....
    Csak füvön élt a kis zebra,
    de most rákapott a zabra;
    végül is elvitték Szobra,
    ott oktatják szebbre-jobbra.
       -Devecseri Gábor-
..... tommi dot nieminen at campus dot jyu dot fi ....
.

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