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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.
A transitive verb like “make”, for example, was assigned the feature [+--NP] meaning that “make” can (+) appear before (--) a noun phrase (NP). [3] Verbs that take just one argument are classified as intransitive, while verbs with two and three arguments are classified as transitive and ditransitive, respectively. [4]
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.
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 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]
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.
In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between arguments—specifically, between the two arguments (in English, subject and object) of transitive verbs like the dog chased the cat, and the single argument of intransitive verbs like the cat ran away.