Dealing with various levels of intransitivity

[Joe Carillo]

When we were children and just beginning to learn our English grammar, many of us no doubt were taken aback by the strange failure of some verbs to work in certain sentence constructions. For instance, perhaps while watching a magician perform in the circus, we might have exclaimed “He gone the rabbit!” and promptly got told off by our parents for our bad grammar. When we probably corrected ourselves by saying “OK, he disappeared the rabbit!” (the way we’d say “Teacher dismissed the class early” without being censured), again we’d be chastised for yet another grammatical gaffe. Then, when the magician finally made the rabbit reappear, we might have confidently said “Now he appeared it again!”—sure this time that by using “appeared” (as in the case of “missed” in “I missed class today”), we could no longer be possibly wrong. But as we might have learned to expect, such a sentence construction was unacceptable, too!

TO FUNCTION, TRANSITIVE VERBS NEED A DIRECT OBJECT, INTRANSITIVE VERBS DON'T

So, we might have asked in exasperation, what seemed to be the matter with such verbs? Why couldn’t “gone,” “disappear,” and “appear” behave like the good, old verbs we knew—verbs like “scare,” “build,” “fix,” and “receive”? Like “missed” above, didn’t these verbs work perfectly in such sentences as “He scared the rabbit,” “Daddy built a tree house,” “My brother fixed my bike,” and “My sister received a love letter”?

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. As we would learn later, of course, “gone,” “disappear,” and “appear” are intransitive verbs, or the kind that simply can’t pass on their action to anything in the sentence. Because they don’t have the power to transmit their action to a so-called direct object, such verbs generally dissipate that action in themselves. When acting as stand-alone verbs, in particular, “gone,” “disappear,” and “appear” can only function in such objectless constructions as these: “The rabbit goes missing.” “The moon disappeared.” “The freckles appeared.” Such verbs absolutely would not admit any takers of their action, even if we put in many more words or phrases to the sentence.

As all of us already know, however, it’s an altogether different matter when a verb is of the transitive kind. This time, for the sentence to work properly, it needs to provide an object to directly receive the verb’s action. 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 what some linguists label “one-place transitives,” as the verbs in these sentences: “The woman received the letter.” “Typhoons damage infrastructure.” “The professor delivered the lecture.” When we drop the direct objects “letter,” “infrastructure,” and “lecture,” so that nothing receives the action of the verb anymore, all the three one-place transitive sentences become nonsensical: “The woman received.” “Typhoons damage.” “The professor delivered.” (No direct object, no sensible sentence.)

We also know, of course, that 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. Such a verb is the so-called “Vg two-place transitive,” or short for the linguistic label “two-place transitive like give” (the “g” in “Vg” stands for “give). In this verb type, the verb first acts on the direct object and transmits the result of the action to the indirect object, as in these sentences: “He buys her diamonds.” “She brings him apples.” “They served Joanna breakfast.” The indirect objects in these sentences are the pronouns “her,” “him,” and “Joanna,” while the direct objects are “diamonds,” “apples,” and “breakfast.” But the indirect objects are optional in such sentences, which will work perfectly even with only the direct objects around.

The third and last type of transitive verbs carries the “Vc two-place transitive” label, which is short for “two-place transitive like consider” (the “c” in “Vc” stands for “consider”). In such verbs, the action of the verb 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: “They considered the rebellion a lost cause.” “Factual errors like this make the editors extremely suspicious.” “The beauty queen’s detractors believe her victory to be a fluke.”

In “Vc two-place transitive” constructions, the verb is followed by a noun phrase working as direct object, onto which must be attached an obligatory complement such as another noun phrase, adjective phrase, or infinitive phrase. These complements, however, unlike the indirect objects of “Vg two-place transitives,” don’t function as indirect objects but modify the direct object instead.

ADDENDUM TO PUT TRANSITIVE VERBS IN MUCH 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 fiancée a box of fancy chocolates” (“his fiancée” that comes right after verb is the indirect object and “a box of fancy chocolate” 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 fiancée” (“a box of fancy chocolates” is the indirect object and “his fiancée” 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, which appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times on July 18, 2009, ©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Dealing with various levels of intransitivity

Next week: Helping intransitive verbs surmount their handicap         (September 19, 2024)

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