Intransitive Verb

Information about Intransitive Verb

“Intransitive” redirects here. For intransitive relations in mathematics, see Intransitivity.

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. For example, in English, the verbs die, condescend and swim, are intransitive.

A linking verb may or may not be considered a proper intransitive verb.

Valency-changing operations

In languages where a passive voice exists, a transitive verb can be passivized in order to turn it into an intransitive one. For example, the transitive verb hug becomes the intransitive verb phrase be hugged. Passivization involves deleting the subject and replacing it by the direct object (this shift is called promotion of the object).

Intransitive verbs, of course, cannot be passivized in the strict sense, However, some languages (like Dutch) have so-called impersonal passives that allow one to transform, e. g. He phoned into the equivalent of There was a phoning [a phone call] (by him).

There are ergative-absolutive languages with an antipassive voice. In this voice operation, the direct object (marked with the absolutive case) is deleted, and the subject (marked ergative) is promoted to absolutive.

Causative operators can turn intransitive verbs into transitive. In English, the general causative form is a periphrasis: cause X to verb, make X verb, etc. In other languages there is specific verb morphology for this. In many cases the causation is expressed by a different lexical item: fall → drop; eat → feed.

Ambitransitivity

In most languages, there are some verbs which are ambitransitive: they can act as intransitive or as transitive. For example, English play is ambitransitive (both intransitive and transitive), since it is grammatical to say His son plays, and it is also grammatical to say His son plays guitar. English is rather flexible with regards to 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.

In some ambitransitive verbs, called ergative verbs, the alignment of the syntactic arguments to the semantic roles is exchanged. An example of this is the verb break in English.

(1) I broke the cup.

(2) The cup broke.

In (1), the verb is transitive, and the subject is the agent of the action, i. e. the performer of the action of breaking the cup. In (2), the verb is intransitive and the subject is the patient of the action, i. e. it is the thing affected by the action, not the one that performs it. In fact, the patient is the same in both sentences, and sentence (2) is an example of implicit middle voice. This has also been termed an anticausative.

Other alternating intransitive verbs in English are change and sink.

In the Romance languages, these verbs are often called pseudo-reflexive, because they are signaled in the same way as reflexive verbs, using the clitic particle se. Compare the following (in Spanish):

(3a) La taza se rompió. ("The cup broke.")

(3b) El barco se hundió. ("The boat sank.")

(4a) Ella se miró en el espejo. ("She looked at herself in the mirror.")

(4b) El gato se lava. ("The cat washes itself.")

Sentences (3a) and (3b) show Romance pseudo-reflexive phrases, corresponding to English alternating intransitives. As in The cup broke, they are inherently without an agent; their deep structure does not and can not contain one. The action is not reflexive (as in (4a) and (4b)) because it is not performed by the subject; it just happens to it. Therefore, this is not the same as passive voice, where an intransitive verb phrase appears, but there is an implicit agent (which can be made explicit using a complement phrase):

(5) The cup was broken (by the child).

(6) El barco fue hundido (por piratas). ("The boat was sunk (by pirates).")

Other ambitransitive verbs (like eat) are not of the alternating type; the subject is always the agent of the action, and the object is simply optional. A few verbs are of both types at once, like read: compare I read, I read a magazine, and this magazine reads easily.

Cognate objects

Main article: Cognate object

In many languages, including English, some or all intransitive verbs can take cognate objects — objects formed from the same roots as the verbs themselves; for example, the verb sleep is ordinarily intransitive, but one can say, "He slept a troubled sleep", meaning roughly "He slept, and his sleep was troubled."

Grammar is the study of the rules governing the use of a given natural language, and as such a field of linguistics. Traditionally, grammar included morphology and syntax, in modern linguistics commonly expanded by the subfields of phonetics, phonology, orthography, semantics, and
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verb is a word belonging to the part of speech that usually denotes an action (bring, read), an occurrence (decompose, glitter), or a state of being (exist, stand).
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subject of the sentence and the other being its predicate. In English, subjects govern agreement on the verb or auxiliary verb that carries the main tense of the sentence, as exemplified by the difference in verb forms between he eats and they eat.
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A syntactic verb argument, in linguistics, is a phrase that appears in a relationship with the verb in a clause. Typical syntactic arguments are the subject and the direct object, which are usually termed "core arguments".

Arguments can be optional or compulsory.
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In linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to number of arguments controlled by a verbal predicate. It is related, though not identical, to verb transitivity, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate.
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English}}}
Writing system: Latin (English variant)
Official status
Official language of: 53 countries
Regulated by: no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1: en
ISO 639-2: eng
ISO 639-3: eng
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In linguistics, a copula is a word used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate (a subject complement or an adverbial). Although it might not itself express an action or condition, it serves to equate (or associate) the subject with the predicate.
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In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object, etc.). When the subject is the agent or actor of the verb, the verb is in the active voice.
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Writing system: Latin alphabet (Dutch variant)
Official status
Official language of: Aruba
Belgium
European Union
European Union
Netherlands Antilles
Suriname
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The antipassive voice is a verb voice found mostly in ergative languages. Like the passive voice, the antipassive decreases the verb's valency by one.

The antipassive works on transitive verbs by deleting the object (marked with the absolutive case) and changing the agent
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A causative form, in linguistics, is an expression of an agent causing or forcing a patient to perform an action (or to be in a certain condition).

All languages have ways to express causation, but they differ in the means.
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periphrasis is a device by which a grammatical concept is expressed by more than one word (typically one or more function words modifying a content word), instead of being shown by inflection or derivation.
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An ambitransitive verb is a verb that can be used both as intransitive or as transitive without requiring a morphological change. That is, the same verb form may or may not require a direct object.
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In linguistics, an ergative verb is a verb that can be either transitive or intransitive, and whose subject when intransitive corresponds to its direct object when transitive.
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Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family that comprisies all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire.
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In grammar, a reflexive verb is a verb whose semantic agent and patient (typically represented syntactically by the subject and the direct object) are the same. For example, the English verb to perjure is reflexive, since one can only perjure oneself.
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In linguistics, a clitic is an element that has some of the properties of an independent word and some more typical of a bound morpheme. Many clitics can be understood as elements undergoing a historical process of grammaticalization:^[1]

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In linguistics, and especially the study of syntax, the deep structure of a linguistic expression is a theoretical construct that seeks to unify several related structures.
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In linguistics, a cognate object (or cognate accusative) is a verb's object that is cognate with the verb. More specifically, the verb is one that is ordinarily intransitive (lacking any object), and the cognate object is simply the verb's noun form.
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Transitivity is a grammatical category in some languages ^[1] ^[2]. For example, the verb which has an object (called a transitive verb) takes on another paradigm, than the verb which has no object (called an intransitive verb).
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In syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a subject and one or more objects. Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs:

Kyle sees Adam. (Adam is the direct object of "sees")
You lifted the bag.

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In grammar, a ditransitive verb is a verb which takes a subject and two objects. According to certain linguistics considerations, these objects may be called direct and indirect, or primary and secondary.
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In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the system used to distinguish between the arguments of transitive verbs and those of intransitive verbs. The distinction can be made morphologically (through grammatical case or verbal agreement), syntactically (through word
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