162 Chapter 6 Clause types
(74) Rudi parcaja.
Rudi believe
‘Rudi believes him.’
(75) Wati enga'.
Wati remember
‘Wati remembered it.’
(76) Hasan baji'.
Hasan hate
‘Hasan hates him.’
The sentences in (74-76) are common cases of null pronouns. (See Chapter 13
for more on null pronouns.) It is thus possible to identify subcategories of sta-
tive predicates of experience. Those that are obligatorily transitive include: baji'
‘hate’, enga' ‘remember’, esto ‘love’, kasta ‘regret’, lebur ‘like’, loppa ‘forget’,
ngarte ‘understand’, parcaja ‘believe’, tao ‘know’, tresna ‘love’, yaken ‘be
sure’, and others.
4.3 Transitive clauses
Dynamic transitive verbs are both semantically and syntactically transitive in
their active form. Semantically they can largely be characterized as those predi-
cates which take an actor argument (that which initiates or carries out the action,
prototypically an agent) and a theme (that which is affected by the action, proto-
typically a patient). Syntactically, the basic order in a transitive clause is subject
- verb - object, the object taking neither prepositional nor case marking. Mor-
phologically, the verb obligatorily takes actor voice marking in the active,
which in other works is taken to be the neutral form and which is what is of-
fered by speakers in direct elicitation situations. The sentences in (77-80) illu-
strate.
(77) Ebu' melle berras.
mother AV.buy rice
‘Mother buys rice.’
(78) Embi' rowa ngekke' Ale'.
goat that AV.bite yngr.sibling
‘That goat bit little sister.’