More Gracese: overtransivitizing

Here are a few more sentences I wanted to blog about before I forgot them, mostly for their charm, but also for their grammatical interest:

Grace, asking me to toss her in the air: Daddy, will you jump me

and

Grace, hearing me drop something: What did you just fall down

In both of these cases, Grace has transivitized a verb according to the standard English pattern, except that Standard English doesn't transivitize either of these verbs in just this way.

Here's the standard pattern Grace is working from:

Verb	Intransitive Form	Transitive Form
X	To X	To cause (Y) to X
Open	The box opens	She opens the box
Stop	He stops at the sign.	She stops traffic.
Sit	She sits down	She sits the doll down
Trip	He trips over the rug.	She trips him.
Move over	I'll move over for you	I'll move this over for you

For any students of Spanish following, the same pattern applies in Spanish, with a "se" marking the intransitive forms.

Verb	Intransitpattern.pattern.ive Form	Transitive Form
X	To X	To cause (Y) to X
Abrir	La caja se abre	Ella abre la caja.
Parar	Se para al señal	Ella para el tráfico.
Sentar	Se sienta.	Sienta la muñeca.

Not too long ago I read a nice description of which verbs accept the transitivizing pattern and which do not in a popular linguistics book. Alas, I can't recall which book at the moment, nor can I really recall just how strongly predictive the explanation given is.

Grace extended this pattern to two cases where it doesn't belong. In the case of "fall down", there simply is no transitive form of "fall." I suspect that this is part of a relatively clear pattern.

In the case of "jump", there are a couple of transitive uses, but neither of them mean "to cause to jump." Instead, they mean "to jump (at)" or (in checkers) "to jump (over)", with the transitive form basically eliding a preposition. If I think of other verbs similar to "jump" in meaning, I can see some similar transitive uses: skip (vt = to skip over), hop (vt = hop on, as in a train), or in other cases no transitive form available (prance, leap).

Thinking of verbs of motion, there are some neat patterns -- flip, turn, and spin all follow the transivitizing pattern, for example, whereas skip, hop and jump do not -- but it's still a bit hard for me to see what the proper pattern is.

Here's a rough chart of some verbs in the family...

Follow pattern	Has idiomatic transitive	Has no transitive form
flip, turn, spin, twist	hop, skip, jump	leap, prance,
Move (over)	run	go
land, fly		take off, soar
crash, trip		fall, stumble
break, hurt, heal		get better, get worse

Laying it out this way, it's hard to believe there is a pattern underlying it (though I imagine there is, at least of a sort). At any rate, I don't envy Grace the job of sorting it all out.