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Often there is a semantic difference between the intransitive and transitive forms of a verb: the water is boiling versus I boiled the water; the grapes grew versus I grew the grapes. In these examples, known as ergative verbs , the role of the subject differs between intransitive and transitive verbs.
Verbs that can be used in an intransitive or transitive way are called ambitransitive verbs. In English, an example is the verb to eat; the sentences You eat (with an intransitive form) and You eat apples (a transitive form that has apples as the object) are both grammatical. The concept of valency is related to transitivity. The valency of a ...
An ambitransitive verb is a verb that is both intransitive and transitive. [1]: 4 This verb may or may not require a direct object.English has many ambitransitive verbs. . Examples include read, break, and understand (e.g., "I read the book", saying what was read, or just "I read all afternoo
In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb, aside from an auxiliary verb, whose context does not entail a transitive object. That lack of an object distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additionally, intransitive verbs are typically considered within a class apart from modal verbs and ...
S refers to the subject of an intransitive verb, A refers to the agent of a transitive verb, and P refers to the patient of a transitive verb. (The patient is sometimes also called undergoer or theme.) These are core arguments of a verb: Lydia (S) is sleeping. Don (A) is cooking dinner (P).
Their distribution in a clause is partly indicated by traditional terms defining verbs as transitive or intransitive. Modern English reference grammars are in broad agreement as to a full inventory, but are not unanimous in their terminology or their classification. Clause elements may be identified by unique terms.
In English, many anticausatives are of the class of "alternating ambitransitive verbs", where the alternation between transitive and intransitive forms produces a change of the position of the patient role (the transitive form has a patientive direct object, and this becomes the patientive subject in the intransitive).
Intransitive and transitive verbs are the most common, but the impersonal and objective verbs are somewhat different from the norm. In the objective, the verb takes an object but no subject; the nonreferent subject in some uses may be marked in the verb by an incorporated dummy pronoun similar to that used with the English weather verbs.