What is the difference between’marry’ and’marry’?
Marry can be used both transitively:
“Paul Married Jane”
and intransitively:
“I got married”.
Thus making the word ambitransitive
If it has a third use:
“Paul, the vicar Married Jane to Bob”
The last use is certainly transitive, but what is the word for this use?
Is this to do with (un)accusative and (un)ergative verbs?
What is the meaning of it all?
When used passively (they are letting me marry someone) there seems to be no problem.
Do you think context is everything?
My friend Bob had an
affair with me and was in love. He got married with me. It made sense.
What’s the difference between my marriage to a woman named Bob or me posing for him/her without elaborating upon it??
The moment three people are mentioned, it usually not that hard to distinguish object, indirect object and subject, in which case the objects are the ones that end up as a couple by the action of the subject.
“Words like Marry are called Reciprocal Verbs, or Predicates, or Constructions.
For such a difference, they refer to sets of agents, instead of one agent. Marry is a pretype. For a girl to be married.It is a male personality. Reciprocal predicates have unusual syntactic affordances, like the ability to swap subject and object without altering meaning. Note:
- Bill and Sue married yesterday (dual subject, intransitive)
- Bill married Sue yesterday Sue married Bill yesterday (subject swap, transitive)
These meanings of marry are Inchoative — they refer to change of state. After their marital union, Bill and Sue entered the state of marriage, a Stative meaning. The adjective married describes the state, not the event of its inception:
- Bill Bill is married to Sue Sue is married
- to Bill Bill is married George is an unmarried man
- but note George is not married to Sue vs
- *George is unmarried to Sue is married to George
- George became a wife, but later married Bill his wife. They had four sons. George married Sue to Bill.
- Sue’s father married off her young (to Jon Blitz).
- Their parents were married off very young when the couple left a high school.
Which one of our
- relations has a stative or prodicate sense as a
predicate adjective be married (derived from a past participle, - but without verbal powers), an inchoative sense meaning
“come to be/become marry” (a - reciprocal verb, allowing argument-swapping) and a causative sense
meaning “cause to become married” each one has different uses, constructions, and
stigmata.
