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Comments on Hopper and Thompson's ‘Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse‘

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Marianne Mithun*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara

Extract

The 1980 publication of ‘Transitivity in grammar and discourse’ by Paul Hopper and Sandra Thompson offered an alternative to the focus of much of the field at that time in both methodology and goals. Shared objectives were, of course, an understanding of what language is like and why. But views of just what this might mean and how to achieve it differed in several ways.

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Type
Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Linguistic Society of America 2025

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