Transitivity in Ossetic language

The paper is devoted to a study of transitivity in the Ossetic (Iron) language. Ossetic marks transitive / intransitive opposition in different ways: vowel (and, more rarely, consonant) alternations in the verb stem, different copulas and two types 12 of conjugation. The vowel alternation (strong vowels marking transitive and weak vowels, intransitive meaning) is only used in a limited class of verbs. The majority of Ossetic verbs are complex verbs, i.e. verbal units which consist of a nominal and a verbal part. In general, the verb wɜvən ‘to be, to become’ conveys intransitive and the verb kɜnən ‘to do’, transitive meaning. Transitive and intransitive verbs have different conjugations in the Past and Counterfactive.

In this paper, I discuss the correlation between the verb semantics and the conjugation types. The study of the Ossetic verbal lexicon reveals a number of peculiarities: 1. There is a class of 32 semantically intransitive verbs which obligatorily use the transitive conjugation; 2. There are semantically transitive verbs which use the intransitive conjugation; 3. There are labile verbs which use either the transitive or the intransitive conjugation depending on their transitive / intransitive semantics; 4. There are labile verbs which always use only one type of conjugation regardless of their transitive or intransitive semantics. In the paper, I discuss in detail only the first class of verbs (semantically intransitive verbs with the transitive conjugation). A small class of semantically intransitive verbs which function as transitives is also attested in other Eastern and some Western Iranian languages [Edelman 1990]. The Ossetic data proposed in this paper serve to enrich the typological landscape of Iranian languages.