Intransitive verb


In grammar, an intransitive verb does not allow a direct object. This is distinct from a transitive verb, which takes one or more objects. The verb property is called transitivity. Intransitive verbs are often identified as those that can't be followed by who or what.

Examples

In the following sentences, verbs are used without a direct object:
The following sentences contain transitive verbs :
Some verbs, called ambitransitive verbs, allow for objects but do not always require one. Such a verb may be used as intransitive in one sentence, and as transitive in another.
In general, intransitive verbs often involve weather terms, involuntary processes, states, bodily functions, motion, action processes, cognition, sensation, and emotion.

Valency-changing operations

The valency of a verb is related to transitivity. Where the transitivity of a verb only considers the objects, the valency of a verb considers all the arguments the verb takes, including both the subject of the verb and all of the objects.
It is possible to change the transitivity of a verb, and in so doing to change the valency.
In languages that have a passive voice, a transitive verb in the active voice becomes intransitive in the passive voice. For example, consider the following sentence:
In this sentence, "hugged" is a transitive verb taking "Mary" as its object. The sentence can be made passive with the direct object "Mary" as the grammatical subject as follows:
This shift is called promotion of the object.
The passive-voice construction cannot take an object. The passivized sentence could be continued with the agent:
It cannot be continued with a direct object to be taken by "was hugged." For example, it would be ungrammatical to write "Mary was hugged her daughter" to show that Mary and her daughter shared a hug.
Intransitive verbs can be made passive in some languages. In English, intransitive verbs can be used in the passive voice when a prepositional phrase is included, as in, "The houses were lived in by millions of people."
Some languages, such as Dutch, have an impersonal passive voice that lets an intransitive verb without a prepositional phrase be passive. In German, a sentence such as "The children sleep" can be made passive to remove the subject and becomes, "It is slept." However, no addition like "...by the children" is possible in such cases.
In languages with ergative–absolutive alignment, the passive voice does not make sense, because the noun associated with the intransitive verb is marked as the object, not as the subject. Instead, these often have an antipassive voice. In this context, the subject of a transitive verb is promoted to the "object" of the corresponding intransitive verb. In the context of a nominative–accusative language like English, this promotion is nonsensical because intransitive verbs don't take objects, they take subjects, and so the subject of a transitive verb is also the subject of the intransitive passive construction. But in an ergative–absolutive language like Dyirbal, "I" in the transitive I hug him would take the ergative case, but the "I" in I was hugged would take the absolutive, and so by analogy the antipassive construction more closely resembles *was hugged me. Thus in this example, the ergative is promoted to the absolutive, and the agent, which was formerly marked by the absolutive, is deleted to form the antipassive voice.

Ambitransitivity

In many languages, there are "ambitransitive" verbs, which can be either transitive or intransitive. For example, English play is ambitransitive, since it is grammatical to say His son plays, and it is also grammatical to say His son plays guitar. English is rather flexible as regards verb valency, and so it has a high number of ambitransitive verbs; other languages are more rigid and require explicit valency changing operations 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.
In, 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, 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 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 :
Sentences and 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 and ) 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 :
Other ambitransitive verbs 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.
Some languages like Japanese have different forms of certain verbs to show transitivity. For example, there are two forms of the verb "to start":
In Japanese, the form of the verb indicates the number of arguments the sentence needs to have.

Unaccusative and unergative verbs

Especially in some languages, it makes sense to classify intransitive verbs as:
This distinction may in some cases be reflected in the grammar, where for instance different auxiliary verbs may be used for the two categories.

Cognate objects

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."

Other languages

In Pingelapese, a Micronesian language, intransitive verb sentence structure is often used, with no object attached. There must be a stative or active verb to have an intransitive sentence. A stative verb has a person or an object that is directly influenced by a verb. An active verb has the direct action performed by the subject. The word order that is most commonly associated with intransitive sentences is subject-verb. However, verb-subject is used if the verb is unaccusative or by discourse pragmatics.
In Tokelauan, the noun phrases used with verbs are required when verbs are placed in groups. Verbs are divided into two major groups.
Every verbal sentence must have that structure, which contains a singular noun phrase, without a preposition, called an unmarked noun phrase. Only if a ko-phrase precedes the predicate, that rule may be ignored. Intransitive verb#cite note-6| The agent is what speakers of the language call the person who is performing the action of the verb.Intransitive verb#cite note-6| If a noun phrase that starts with the preposition e is able to express the agent, and the receiving person or thing that the agent is performing the action of the verb to is expressed by a singular noun phrase that lack a preposition, or unmarked noun phrase, the verb is then considered transitive.Intransitive verb#cite note-6| All other verbs are considered intransitive.Intransitive verb#cite note-6|