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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 ...
In these examples, known as ergative verbs, the role of the subject differs between intransitive and transitive verbs. Even though an intransitive verb may not take a direct object, it often may take an appropriate indirect object: I laughed at him. What are considered to be intransitive verbs can also take cognate objects, where the object is ...
I'd have appreciated some exapmples used in context. The article begins with a definition and some examples: "In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb that does have a subject and does not have an object. In more technical terms, an intransitive verb has only one argument (its subject), and hence has a valency of one.
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 intransitive verb is associated with only one argument, a subject. The different kinds of arguments are usually represented as S , A , and O . S is the sole argument of an intransitive verb, A is the subject (or most agent-like ) argument of a transitive verb, and O is the direct object (or most patient-like ) argument of a transitive verb.
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]
About a sixth of the world's languages have ergative alignment. The best known are probably the Inuit languages and Basque. Active–stative alignment treats the arguments of intransitive verbs like the A argument of transitives (like English) in some cases and like transitive O arguments (like Inuit) in other cases (S a =A; S o =O).
Basque is a language isolate with a polypersonal verbal system comprising two sub-types of verbs, synthetic and analytical. The following three cases are cross-referenced on the verb: the absolutive (the case for the subject of intransitive verbs and the direct objects of transitive verbs), the ergative (the case for the subject of transitive verbs), and the dative (the case for the indirect ...