Transitivity was introduced in A6 as a determining factor in the formation of passives. It is discussed in more detail in A8 as a fundamental feature in different types of clauses. In this section it is investigated as a characteristic of verbs.
The main question is: to what extent can verbs be characterised as transitive or intransitive?
It is impossible to divide verbs neatly into two subclasses: transitive and intran
sitive. There are a number of reasons for this:
C6
V E R B S W H I C H C A N B E T R A N S I T I V E A N D I N T R A N S I T I V E 159
many frequent verbs occur in a number of patterns (see B8), some transitive and
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some not, usually with a difference in meaning:
He runs every day.
He runs a multi-million-dollar corporation.
And in fact many frequent verbs that are typically regarded as transitive have less common intransitive uses:
That will do! (= ‘is enough’)
We pulled hard but it wouldn’t give. (= ‘move’)
some verbs seem neutral to the idea of transitivity, appearing with or without an
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object with the same meaning, e.g. drive, drink, eat, read:
I can drive / I can drive a car.
Some are very limited in their range of objects, having a ‘cognate’ object when transitive, e.g. sing with song and similar nouns:
He was singing in the bath.
He was singing his favourite song in the bath.
verbs that involve a reflexive or reciprocal action verbs can omit their
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object
He washed and dressed before going out.
They’ve been fighting ever since they got married.
Compare these with the transitive versions with the appropriate object pronouns inserted:
washed and dressed himself (reflexive), fighting each other (reciprocal) In many European languages an object pronoun would be obligatory in this situation.
many verbs seem basically transitive but have missing (ellipted) objects, which
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are already known:
Can you re-send? (talking about an email message) To repeat, . . . (cf. To repeat what I said before . . . ) If we paraphrase we can see the hidden passives. (from A6) Are you going to buy or not?
In fact many of socalled transitive verbs in English seem to have the ability to appear without an object, given the right circumstances.
Another phenomenon involving a relationship between transitive and intransitive verbs, ergativity, is investigated in C7.
The following activities examine some of this variation.
Look at the sets of concordance lines below. In each case identify the lines where the verb is used transitively and where it is intransitive.
There may be cases where this is not clear, or where other factors are involved.
Then say what the relationship is between the transitive and intransitive forms according to the above bullet points. Is it possible to say whether each verb is mainly transitive or intransitive?
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Activity C6.1A. RUN
(Note that the form run can represent the infinitive, present tense or -ed participle.)
1. You can still run a storage heater for less than 70p per week!
2. She used to run a playschool . . .
3. The pair reckon the story will run and run until conclusive proof is provided . . .
4. A course in cancer counselling is to be run at Magee College . . . 5. There’s ditches where the water has run away all the boulder clay . . . 6. . . . they’re timid creatures who will run away at the slightest sound . . . 7. Peakhour trams will run every six minutes . . .
8. I don’t want one of them to run her fingers through my hair . . . 9. There’s a couple of ideas I’d like to run in front of you . . . 10. If I had been able to run my own theatre . . .
11. . . . all new cars will have to be able to run on unleaded petrol . . . 12. . . . what happens when the wine has run out.
13. . . . ensuring that all phases of the programme run smoothly . . . 14. We may need to have another look at him and run some tests . . . 15. The measures will run to the end of 1990.
16. We’ve run up a cost of two hundred and fifty quid . . . B. DRIVE
(The form drive can represent the infinitive or the present tense.) 1. . . . I happen to drive a very small car . . .
2. It was fast, fun to drive, and, despite a high price, had an enthusiastic following.
3. He had the mobility and authority to drive around the reserve after dark . . .
4. People may smoke, drive at 80 miles an hour in fog on a motorway . . . 5. Unless you drive everywhere at less than 40mph . . .
6. Others . . . scheduled business calls first thing so that they could drive in later.
7. The doctor would not test his fitness to drive.
8. I’ll let you drive me all the way round . . . 9. That’s guaranteed to drive me to despair.
10. What are you going to do next? Drive my taxi into the river?
11. . . . I’m learning how to drive now . . .
12. Can you drive over with Christina or Edward?
13. But the plan is not just an ideal for those who do not drive.
14. . . . a buildup of stress which can drive people to rely on drink . . . 15. Who will drive the publication?
16. You have a car, so one way is to drive there . . . C. MET
(The form met can represent the past tense or -ed participle.) 1. The club has met four times in SDCI’s office . . . 2. I have never met a more beautiful woman.
V E R B S W H I C H C A N B E T R A N S I T I V E A N D I N T R A N S I T I V E 161
3. . . . and there we met a group of people . . .
4. . . . people only obey his decisions if certain conditions are met . . . 5. . . . the poverty and injustices which he daily met around him . . . 6. We all met at a preluncheon reception . . .
7. Five criteria must be met before merger accounting can be used.
8. Give me a lineup of blokes I’ve never met before . . . 9. Such arguments were met by an unwillingness . . .
10. I seem to remember that when we met earlier in the year . . .
11. [This] pitched the Cabinet into more controversy as it met for the first time since the summer break . . .
12. I’ve never met his wife . . .
13. Your committee met on 2 December . . . 14. Each time we met we just felt closer . . .
Comments Activity C6.1:
ATransitive: 1, 2, 4 (passive), 5 (phrasal), 8, 9 (a relative clause), 10, 14, 16 (phrasal) Intransitive: 3, 6 (phrasal), 7, 12 (phrasal), 13, 15
11 could be either transitive or intransitive. In other words, on unleaded petrol can be interpreted as a prepositional object (What will they run on?) or an adverbial (How will they run?). See A8 for an explanation of the use of wh- words in identifying objects or other clause elements. See also C8 (‘Hidden verb patterns’) for cases such as relative clauses where the object may not be obvious.
Note that run is quite commonly used as a phrasal verb (both transitive and intransi tive): run away / out (of ) / up.
Overall, it is impossible to characterise run as principally a transitive or intransi
tive verb. It has a whole range of meanings linked either to the transitive use (‘manage’,
‘operate’) or to the intransitive (‘last’). Note that, of the intransitive uses, none actually represents the ‘basic’ meaning of moving quickly using one’s legs.
BTransitive: 1, 2*, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15 Intransitive: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 16
*: It refers to ‘a car’, the object of drive. If the sentence was It was fun to drive along the beach in our car then it would not refer to a car; this would be a case of extra position (see A11) and the verb would be intransitive.
In all the intransitive lines ‘a car/vehicle’ could be inserted. This suggests that there is little difference between the transitive and intransitive forms. But the meta
phorical transitive uses (lines 9, 14 and 15) do not correspond to any intransitive use.
CTransitive: 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12 Intransitive: 1, 6, 10, 11, 13, 14
All the intransitive lines could be characterised as reciprocal (we all met each other).
ERGATIVITY
Section C6 investigated the concept of transitivity in some detail, finding that the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs is not a simple one. A number of relationships were identified, for example
verbs which can be both transitive and intransitive, but with a difference (or
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differences) in meaning
verbs which include or do without an object ‘at the drop of a hat’
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This section looks at one more relationship.
Look at these two extracts.
a) A master and servant are talking.
‘I have . . . ruined my clothes’.
‘They will clean, sir.’
(from a historical novel, Dissolution, by C.J. Sansom) b) Some men are discussing a ship.
The fuss that was made while that ship was building.
(from a short story by Joseph Conrad, ‘The Brute’)
How can you explain the use of clean and build here? Are they intransitive verbs? What do ‘they’ and ‘the ship’ refer to?
Verbs such as clean and build, where the ‘object’ replaces the subject without any other change, are called ‘ergative’. Ergative verbs are both transitive and intransitive (though the term is usually applied to the latter use). In the transitive/intransitive verbs that we have seen so far it is the object that is left out when a transitive verb becomes intransitive:
I sang a song. / I sang.
I’m learning to drive a car. / I’m learning to drive.
But with ergative verbs it is the subject that is omitted, to be replaced by the object.
They started the game. / The game started.
He moved his head. / His head moved.
Ergativity is common with verbs involving movement and change of state where the thing affected may be more important than the agent or doer, for example
The glass suddenly shattered.
Prices have doubled in the last month.
C7
Activity C7.1
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E R G AT I V I T Y 163
Ergatives look very similar to passives without a by phrase:
The door was slowly opened.
And the meaning is similar, in that both avoid mentioning the agent, but there is a difference. The passive implies an action with an ‘agent’ (the person or thing that causes an action – see A8) even if not mentioned, while the ergative suggests a spon
taneous event without an agent:
The door slowly opened.
In many European languages the equivalent sentence would be constructed with a reflexive pronoun (‘The door opened itself.’).
Sometimes a verb is used ergatively only if there is an adverbial:
This car drives beautifully.
The book is selling like hot cakes.
Your essay reads well until the conclusion.
And some ergative verbs have a restricted range of subjects:
Then the bell/alarm rang/sounded.
Decide what patterns (intransitive, transitive, transitive/intransitive, ergative) these verbs have:
fall, bounce, show, die, boil, dance
Think of examples of each use. (NB: By calling a verb ‘ergative’ we are saying that it is both transitive and intransitive, but in the way described above.)
Look at the concordance lines for various forms of the verb improve. Identify those which are transitive, and those which, while intransitive, are in an ergative relationship to the transitive form. What do you notice about the subjects in each case?
1. . . . it’s done very well indeed to improve its profits . . .
2. So people tried to set up unions to improve living and working conditions . . .
3. . . . many head injured patients will fail to improve and could even get worse.
4. But it has to be applied properly or it will not improve the quality of education.
5. . . . we will continue to look for ways to improve the nutritional properties of our products.
6. . . . only when government took action did situations improve at all.
7. Some have received large capital grants to improve their buildings . . . 8. Until recently most pundits expected the market to improve in the
spring . . .
9. What do we want to improve most of all?
10. Current video printers . . . are improving all the time.
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Activity C7.2✪
Activity C7.311. . . . with a clear objective of increasing sales and improving customer service.
12. Their health improved and a cure was claimed in many cases.
13. Imaging quality has now been vastly improved . . . 14. Gradually agricultural tools improved as well.
15. . . . we’ve marginally improved our market share.
Look at the concordance lines for closed below. Identify those which are transi
tive, and those which, while intransitive, are in an ergative relationship to the transitive form. Note also that some instances of closed are adjectives.
1. . . . he worked at the Admiralty . . . until it closed 10 years ago.
2. . . . it’s been closed for a couple of years now . . .
3. . . . when the whistle went for nine o’clock that door was closed . . . 4. . . . even more Midlands pits could be closed down.
5. The nitric acid plant has closed down . . .
6. . . . I heard that the house would be closed for renovation.
7. The house is currently closed for extensive conservation works . . . 8. . . . a silent Locomotive Shed with its doors closed for the last time . . . 9. The Opera House closed for two weeks.
10. . . . US markets were largely closed for a holiday.
11. On Wednesday night the main runway was closed for maintenance . . . 12. On 1 May 1956 this branch finally closed, having been opened to
passenger and freight traffic in 1856.
13. . . . it has not yet closed its books for the first quarter . . . 14. . . . the line has been closed only thirtyfive years.
15. No, we’re closed Saturday.
16. One of the girls ran and closed the door . . . 17. . . . the chairman closed the meeting at ten past ten.
18. Its cavernous classrooms became silent in 1977 when the school closed.
19. It remained closed until the idea of a union was forgotten.
20. The evening closed with questions to the Speaker . . .
And finally a story:
The broken window, or how grammar can get you out of trouble Four boys were playing football in their school playground – where it was not allowed.
One of them miskicked the ball and it smashed a window in one of the schoolrooms.
Now they were honest lads and, instead of running away and hiding, they decided to report the broken window to the principal. But first they discussed how to describe the breakage.
The first one, who was a little naïve linguistically, suggested I’m sorry; we have broken the window. But the other three said that it was much too obvious; it would get them into lots of trouble.
Activity C7.4
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E R G AT I V I T Y 165
The second student, who had taken a basic course in English grammar and knew something about the passive, suggested The window has been broken by us. ‘It focuses more on the thing affected than on those responsible for the action’, he said. But the other two said it was still too obvious who was responsible.
The third student, more advanced, knew that the actor could be omitted in the passive. So he suggested The window has been broken. The first two nodded their agreement, but the fourth said ‘But the principal will still know that someone did it and will ask “Who by?” ’
Now this fourth student had read this book and so he knew all about the ergative, and how it could be used to present an action as a happening without any
‘actors’. So he suggested The window has broken. The other three looked at him in awe, and agreed. So that is what they said when they went to see the principal; and the principal just nodded and thanked them for telling him.
MORAL: grammar is good for you. (© Roger Berry 2012) Comments
Activity C7.1: In a) They refers to the clothes. We would normally expect clothes to be the object of clean, but here they are the subject and there is no object. Similarly, in b) the ship would normally be the object of build, or the subject of a passive ( . . . was being built), but here it is the subject.
So although clean and build are normally transitive verbs, they are intransitive here, but intransitive in a different way from other verbs that we have already seen.
Activity C7.2:
fall intransitive Prices have fallen.
bounce ergative He bounced the ball. / The ball bounced.
show ergative He showed his anger. / His anger showed.
die intransitive Those flowers are dying.
(It can also be transitive with a cognate object: He died a painful death.) boil ergative She boiled the water. / The water boiled.
dance transitive/intransitive They danced. / They danced a samba.
Activity C7.3:
Transitive: 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9 (interrogative), 11, 13 (passive), 15 Ergative (intransitive): 3, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14
With the transitive sentences the subjects are basically agents (as discussed in A8 and D8), though in 11 and 13 the agent is not stated. With the ergatives, the subjects are basically people or things affected by the process of improvement.
Activity C7.4:
Transitive: 3 (passive), 4 (passive), 13, 16, 17 Ergative (intransitive): 1, 5, 9, 12, 18, 20
On lines 2, 7, 8, 10, 14, 15, 19 closed is an adjective; see C5.
Lines 6 and 11 are ambiguous; they could be transitive (passive) or adjective.
Note the phrasal verb closed down (which can be ergative, just like close) Note that close can also be intransitive with an object omitted: She closed (her talk) by saying . . . Here it is not ergative.