Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A transitive verb is a verb that entails one or more transitive objects, for example, 'enjoys' in Amadeus enjoys music. This contrasts with intransitive verbs , which do not entail transitive objects, for example, 'arose' in Beatrice arose .
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.
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.
Recent work in case theory has vigorously supported the idea that the ergative case identifies the agent (the intentful performer of an action) of a verb. [ 4 ] In Kalaallisut (Greenlandic) for example, the ergative case is used to mark subjects of transitive verbs and possessors of nouns.
Another category of ditransitive verb is the attributive ditransitive verb in which the two objects are semantically an entity and a quality, a source and a result, etc. These verbs attribute one object to the other. In English, make, name, appoint, consider, turn into and others are examples: The state of New York made Hillary Clinton a Senator.
An example is sink: The ship sank (intransitive use); The explosion sank the ship (transitive use). Other common examples include open, sink, wake, melt, boil, collapse, explode, freeze, start, sell. For more details on how verbs are built up into clauses, see English clause syntax.
In some other languages, in which subjects are not syntactically obligatory, there would be no subject at all: The Spanish translation of It's raining, for example, is a single verb form, Llueve.) An intransitive verb takes one argument, e.g. He 1 sleeps. A transitive verb takes two, e.g. He 1 kicked the ball 2. A ditransitive verb takes three ...
In linguistic typology, ergative–absolutive alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the single argument ("subject") of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the agent ("subject") of a transitive verb. [1] Examples include Basque, Georgian, Mayan, Tibetan, and certain Indo ...