Pitfalls of the Transitivity Hypothesis: Transitivity in Conversation and Written Language in Czech

Abstract

The aim of the article is to test empirically predictions formulated in the Transitivity Hypothesis framework. Methodological problems of the original approach are discussed and some solutions are offered.

For the testing of the hypotheses two corpora of Czech were used (Prague Spoken Corpus and Prague Dependency Treebank). The results question both the predicted impact of the language form on transitivity and, more importantly, the concept of the Transitivity Hypothesis in general.

Keywords

• pitfalls
• transitivity
• hypothesis
• transitivity
• conversation
• written
• language
• czech