Talk:Transitive verb/Archive 1

Ergative vs. normal

"...ergative verbs refer to events that take place within or are directed towards the verb's subject - that is, the instrument of the verb is the subject. The verb "sees" in the second example is one such verb, as are "to think" and "to believe"..... The normal type of verb indicates that an action is exercised against the verb's subject; these verbs often require an object in order to be grammatical. "Lifted" above is one example of such a verb;

I'm not sure I get the distinction between ergative and normal verbs from the definitions above. Surely an indication that events "take place within or are directed towards the verb's subject" is the same as an indication that "action is exercised against the verb's subject"? - dan

Thanks for pointing this out. It should read "...against the verb's object". I fixed it. AxelBoldt 20:55, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Actually, now that I thought about it, the whole paragraph about ergatives is wrong, see ergative verb for the correct version. AxelBoldt 21:12, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Lack of neutrality in the article

The article only describes facts of English language and may lead one into error. The notion of transitivity has nothing to do with the number of objects in many grammars (other than English).

I have added some info on Polish then.

--Grzegorj 11:04, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

• This is English Wiki and should focus on English grammar, but foreign language examples are very helpful. The Polish example is an excellent addition, but somewhat overlong. I've reduced the exceptions part to just saying that exceptions exist. --155.188.183.5 12:40, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

(Vandalism deleted) Arrivisto (talk) 13:20, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Merge

It has been proposed, that article Transitivity (grammatical category) should be merged into here.

Sorry for my having created Transitivity (grammatical category), I have committed it before seeing that Transitive verb really covers the topic, thus a distinct Transitivity (grammatical category) article may seem superfluous.

I committed Transitivity (grammatical category) out of logical reasons: it seemed for me necessary to have a distinct article for the grammatical category itself, which stands (in a Platonic or logical or OOP sense) above its “instances” (transitive verb, intransitive verb).

I saw that almost each grammatical category does have its own artice: polarity, voice etc. Here, especially the “binary” categories are interesing for us (polarity and definiteness): even they have their own category, and are not merged into their “positive instance”. Really, in the case of transitivity, we cannot deal with any natural “positive instance”.

I thought that broader terms have to redirect (merge) to narrower ones (and not vice versa), on the example of middle voice: it is redirected to grammatical voice. In future, maybe a distinct middle voice article will become necessary (e.g. as more and more examples and materials are written). In fact, initating Transitivity (grammatical category) looked like a good idea for me while my enlarging the Sirenik language article.

Sorry again for having created Transitivity (grammatical category) maybe in an inconsiderate way. But is it sure that it will not be important in the future?

Maybe another reason for the distinct article: “Transitive verb” may suggest a property of a (specific) verb, but “Transitivity (grammatical category)” stressses that it can be a morphological feature in some languages, thus, property of the language itself. An analogous emphasis can be read in the lead text of the Polypersonal agreement article.

Physis 11:04, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

I disagree with the merge proposal. The grammatical category article is more technical and focused on comparative lingustics, whereas the verb article is more useful to laypeople and covers grammar. Evan Donovan 00:45, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Removing tag 71.167.35.48 03:58, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

I disagree with the merge ... the structure of verbs is a complex and difficult subject; it gets even tricker when sentences contain conjunctions, which these articles do not cover... I fail to see how a merge would help clarify matters. Anyway .. someone put the merge tag back, without explanation. I'll remove it again. linas (talk) 16:43, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

To be + past participle of transative verb

Surely that is quite a major feature of transative verbs in English and thus should be mentioned? Eg. for "eat", you can say "The apple is eaten", meaning the act of eating (a transative verb) has been carried out on the apple. This obviously isn't the case for verbs that aren't transative - "He is slept" doesn't make sense for example. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.143.201.117 (talk) 22:52, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

"He is slept" makes perfect sense in a fantasy role-playing game, where "someone slept him" occurs frequently. 67.164.44.83 (talk) 04:59, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Sleeping something

The article claims that "you can't sleep something" and therefore "sleep" can't be used as a transitive verb. Perhaps my correction was not phrased in some way more acceptable to nit-pickers, but the fact remains that "sleep" is certainly a transitive verb, because in many many role-playing games, the characters in the game frequently sleep something. For example: "Ok, here's the plan," the magic-user said, "We break in the door, I'll sleep the kobolds, and the rest of you take out the ogre." Accordingly, I have reverted the edit that removed my correction, and anyone who wants to delete it again can reword it instead, or I'll just put it back again. 67.164.44.83 (talk) 03:17, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm skeptical that a role-playing game is ever utilizing common English grammar for communication among its participants. I'm sure there are plenty of scientific parts of speech as well that greatly differ from the normal grammatical rules. Those uses wouldn't invalidate the primary grammatical rules nor create exceptions. It's simply a specialization for use only by those participating within that concentration, and would not make sense in normal speech. 98.151.233.238 (talk) 07:52, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

This Is OK

apparently you did an amount of work but, once merged people working on grammatical problems will be redirected.Defector1234 (talk) 01:29, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

Tried verses Tried on

Should the second 'tried' in this be changed to 'tried on'? "I tried on the shoes. ("shoes" is an object of "tried")" Otherwise the object wouldn't be needed?

202.29.57.211 (talk) 23:44, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Contradiction

There is a contradiction between the first phrase : "In syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a subject and one or more objects." (which is wrong) and the first phrase of the article (which is true) : "While all verbs that take at least one object are considered transitive,". The first one is more restrictive, because the second one doesn't say these verbs must have a subject.

And there are indeed verbs that are transitive but have no subject (= impersonal verb) : in Latin, "me (object) pudet (impersonal verb) alicuius", "there is shame in me of something", "I am ashamed of something". --Fsojic (talk) 22:12, 11 November 2012 (UTC)