48 ROBERT D. VAN VALIN, JR.at least some of the members of the class (state, activity, achievement or
accomplishment) must take either agent or patient arguments. All thematic
relations are defined in terms of argument positions in state and activity
verbs, as shown in Table 4. Single-argument state verbs have a patient as
their thematic relation; patient can be defined as the participant in a state
or condition. Although it is unusual, there are state verbs with agentive
arguments; Dowty (1979) gives the human subjects of verbs like sit, stand
and lie as examples. As noted in section 3.3.1, activity verbs cannot by
definition have a patient argument. From this it follows that activity verbs
can have only actor macroroles, never under goer, because the prototypical
thematic relation for undergoer, patient, never occurs with activity verbs.
In an example like John ate fish for I* in an hour, eat is an activity verb, and
accordingly it cannot take an undergoer macrorole.^28
The macrorole number of a verb corresponds closely to the characteri
zation of a verb in terms of the traditional notion of transitivity: single mac
rorole verbs are intransitive, two macrorole verbs are transitive. The tradi
tional notion refers to the number of arguments that appear in the syntax,
and this corresponds to the number of direct core arguments, in RRG
terms. It is necessary, then, to distinguish between semantic transitivity,
which refers to macrorole number, and syntactic transitivity, which refers to
number of direct core arguments. The number of direct core arguments
need not be the same as that of macroroles; there are never more than two
macroroles, but in a sentence like Mary sent Bill a letter there are three
direct core arguments. From an RRG perspective, the number of direct
core arguments a verb takes is less indicative of its syntactic behavior than
its macrorole number, and consequently "transitivity" is understood in
RRG as semantic transitivity and is defined in terms of the number of mac
roroles a verb takes: 2 = transitive, 1 = intransitive, and 0 = atransitive.
Examples of partial lexical entries for several English verbs are given
in (27).
(27) a. give: [do'(x)] CAUSE [BECOME have'(y,z)]
b. steal·. [DO (x,[do'(x)])] CAUSE [BECOME NOT
have'(y,z)], U=z
sit: sit'(x,y) [+MR]
d. hear: hear'(x,y)
e. open: BECOME open'(x)
f. seem: seem'(x,y), [-MR]