Abstract
Transitivity in linguistics is a widely studied phenomenon and has been since the first grammarians. Today, a consensus seems to emerge around the notion of prototypicity which tends to dissociate semantic transitivity from syntactic transitivity of construction.
The complex meaning of this construction is based on the localist relations (approach, distance, inherence) between the referent subject and the referent object, and this in different “domains”: physical, affective, social, etc. Based on the contributions of cognitive linguistics, but also on the work of Hjelmslev and Bally, the book proposes a model that gives an important place to the functioning of archetypical rather than prototypical relationships and thus renews the study of transitive structure.