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The identification of unaccusative verbs in English is therefore based on other criteria, notably: Many unaccusative verbs alternate with a corresponding transitive verb, where the unaccusative subject appears in direct object position. The ice melted. ≈ The sun melted the ice. The window broke. ≈ The golf ball broke the window.
An unergative verb is an intransitive verb [1] that is characterized semantically by having a subject argument which is an agent that actively initiates the action expressed by the verb. For example, in English, talk and resign in the sentence "You talk and you resign" are unergative verbs, since they are intransitive (one does not say "you ...
English is rather flexible as regards verb valency, and so it has a high number of ambitransitive verbs; other languages are more rigid and require explicit valency changing operations (voice, causative morphology, etc.) to transform a verb from intransitive to transitive or vice versa.
English has a number of ergative verbs: verbs which can be used either intransitively or transitively, where in the intransitive use it is the subject that is receiving the action, and in the transitive use the direct object is receiving the action while the subject is causing it.
In standard English, sentences are composed of five clause patterns: [citation needed] Subject + Verb (intransitive) Example: She runs. Subject + Verb (transitive) + Object Example: She runs the meeting. Subject + Verb (linking) + Subject Complement (adjective, noun, pronoun) Example: Abdul is happy. Jeanne is a person. I am she.
English is unusually lax by comparison with other Indo-European languages in its rules on transitivity; what may appear to be a transitive verb can be used as an intransitive verb, and vice versa. Eat and read and many other verbs can be used either transitively or intransitively.
In particular, by virtue of being antitransitive the relation is not transitive. The game of rock, paper, scissors is an example. The relation over rock, paper, and scissors is "defeats", and the standard rules of the game are such that rock defeats scissors, scissors defeats paper, and paper defeats rock.
In linguistic typology, tripartite alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the main argument ('subject') of an intransitive verb, the agent argument ('subject') of a transitive verb, and the patient argument ('direct object') of a transitive verb are each treated distinctly in the grammatical system of a language. [1]