When we were children and just beginning to learn our English grammar, most of us no doubt would be taken aback by the strange failure of some verbs to work in certain sentence constructions. Perhaps while watching a magician make a rabbit disappear, we might have exclaimed “He
gone the rabbit!” and our parents promptly told us off for our bad grammar.
We’d probably correct ourselves by saying “OK, he
disappeared the rabbit!” but get chastised again for yet another grammatical gaffe. Of course, not long after, the magician would routinely make the rabbit reappear so we’d confidently say “Now he
appeared it again!”—sure this time that we could no longer be wrong. But as we might have learned to expect, that sentence would also be incorrect!
So, in exasperation we might have asked in our minds, what seemed to be the matter with English verbs? Why couldn’t “gone,” “disappear,” and “appear” behave like the good, old verbs that we knew—verbs like “scare,” “build,” and “fix”? As in “missed” in “I
missed class today,” for instance, why didn’t these verbs work in sentences like “The magician
scared the rabbit” and “Daddy
built a treehouse”?
Such were the puzzling dilemmas posed by our first encounters with verbs that don’t possess
“transitivity,” or the ability to pass on their action to something that can receive it. Later, of course, we’d learn that “gone,” “disappear,” and “appear” are
intransitive verbs, the kind that simply can’t pass on their action to anything in the sentence. Because they have no power to transmit their action to a so-called
direct object, such verbs generally dissipate that action in themselves.
As stand-alone verbs, “gone,” “disappear,” and “appear” can only function in objectless constructions like “The rabbit
goes missing” and “The
moon disappeared.” Such verbs absolutely wouldn’t admit any takers of their action, even if we add many more words or phrases to the sentence.
As most of us know now, it’s an altogether different matter when a verb is of
the transitive kind. This time, for the sentence to work properly, all it needs is to provide an
object to receive the verb’s action directly. The basic requirement of transitivity, in fact, is that the subject of the sentence—drawing power from the verb—must be able to act on this
direct object.
Verbs that require only a direct object to work properly are called
“one-place transitives,” as the verbs in “The woman
received the letter” and “Typhoons
damage infrastructure.” When we drop the direct objects “letter” and “infrastructure,” with nothing receiving the verb’s action anymore, all such one-place transitive sentences become nonsensical: “The woman
received.” “Typhoons
damage.” No direct object, no sentence.
Moreover, some transitive verbs not only require
a direct object but may also take
an indirect object, or a grammatical entity that represents a secondary goal of the verb’s action. This verb type is the
“Vg two-place transitive,” which first acts on the direct object, then transmits the result of the action to the indirect object, as in “He
buys her diamonds” and “She
brings him apples.” The indirect objects are the pronouns “her” and “him”; the direct objects are “diamonds” and “apples.” In such sentences the indirect objects are optional; the sentences work perfectly even with only the direct object around.
The third and last type of transitive verb is the so-called
“Vc two-place transitive.” With such verbs, the action actually takes place within the subject or doer of the action, or is done to the subject itself, then is transmitted to the direct object, as in “They considered the rebellion a lost cause” and “Factual errors like this make the editors extremely suspicious.”
In such “Vc two-place transitive” constructions, the verb is followed by a noun phrase working as direct object, onto which an obligatory complement must be attached not as an indirect object but as a modifier of the direct object.*
We’ll take up next how to make intransitive verbs surmount their handicap.
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*TO PUT VERBS IN BETTER PERSPECTIVE:
A transitive verb, also known as one-place transitive, comes before a noun or noun phrase that serves as direct object or the thing that gets acted upon by the verb, as in "The lovers watched the moon" (the noun "moon" is the direct object) and in "The boxers sparred in the half-lit boxing ring" (the noun phrase "half-lit boxing ring" is the indirect object).
There are two types of two-place transitive verbs--the Vg two-place transitive verb (the letter V stands for "verb" and "g" for the word "give") and the Vc two-place transitive verb (the letter V stands for "verb" and "c" for the word "consider")
The Vg two-place transitive verb precedes two nouns or noun phrases in succession, as in "He gave his fiancee a box of fancy chocolates" ("his fiancee" that comes right after verb is the indirect object and "a box of fancy chocolates" is the direct object); the Vg two-place transitive verb can also precede a noun or noun phrase and a prepositional phrase ("He bought a box of fancy chocolates for his fiancee" ("a box of fancy chocolates" is the indirect object and "his fiancee" is the direct object).
The Vc two-place transitive verb precedes a noun or noun phrase and another one (“I consider the president a likable gentleman”), or an adjective (“I believe that the president is likable”) or an infinitive phrase (“I found the president to be likable”). The word or phrase that comes right after the verb is the direct object, and the second word or phrase is a complement.This essay, 2142nd of the series, appears in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the March 16, 2023 digital edition of The Manila Times
, ©2023 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.Read this essay or listen to its voice recording in
The Manila Times:
Dealing with various levels of intransitivity (Next:
Helping intransitive verbs surmount their handicap) March 23, 2023
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
