terminology - How is transitivity defined in CGEL?


This ques­tion is specif­i­cally for those who are fa­mil­iar with the 2002 edi­tion of The Cam­bridge Gram­mar of the English Lan­guage by Hud­dle­ston and Pul­lum.


The book has this pas­sage at page 272:



Strictly speak­ing, an in­tran­si­tive prepo­si­tion may have a com­ple­ment other than an ob­ject NP – e.g. ow­ing in ow­ing to the rain has a PP com­ple­ment. In this sec­tion, how­ever, we will be con­cerned only with in­tran­si­tive prepo­si­tions that have ei­ther no com­ple­ment at all or else a pred­ica­tive, as in That counts [as sat­is­fac­tory].



The book also says that prepo­si­tions can take fi­nite clauses as com­ple­ments as fol­lows:



They ig­nored the ques­tion [of whether it was eth­i­cal]. (page 641)



Here, does the book con­sider the of a transitive preposition (because it takes a clause as a com­ple­ment) or an in­tran­si­tive prepo­si­tion (be­cause it doesn't take an ob­ject NP)?


Also, how about verbs tak­ing fi­nite clauses as non-ob­ject com­ple­ments?


The book on pages 1017–1018:



In the present sub­sec­tion we turn our at­ten­tion to con­tent clauses func­tion­ing as in­ter­nal com­ple­ment to a verb, as in He feared that he might lose his job ([16i]). Tra­di­tional gram­mar not only anal­y­ses the sub­or­di­nate clause here as a noun clause, but as­signs it the same func­tion as that of the NP in He feared the prospect of un­em­ploy­ment, namely that of ob­ject of the verb. Again, how­ever, we be­lieve that the sub­or­di­nate clause is not suf­ficiently like an NP to jus­tify that anal­y­sis.



The feared both in He feared that he might lose his job and in He feared the prospect of un­em­ploy­ment, traditional grammar considers a transitive verb.


The Cambridge Grammar agrees that the one in the second example (taking an object NP as a complement) is a transitive verb. Does the book considers the one in the first example (taking a that-clause as a complement) a transitive or intransitive verb?




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