Transitivity in Spanish conversational discourse

Abstract

I investigate transitivity in Spanish conversation by appealing to Hopper and Thompson’s transitivity scale (1980); and Thompson and Hopper’s study on transitivity in English conversation (2001). My corpus consists of excerpts taken from three different conversations; two of them were randomly chosen from the same conversation in order to determine how transitivity evolves at different moments of the same interaction. I argue that in addition to the analytical levels considered by Thompson and Hopper (2001): the clause and the whole corpus; attention to the conversational excerpt allows for a finer treatment of both transitivity as a composite; and each parameter involved. My results support; in general; Thompson and Hopper’s finding for English that conversation is low in transitivity.
However; by attending to the excerpt-level results; I demonstrate that some excerpts rank high in transitivity and that excerpts of the same conversation can differ in their ranking for specific features.