Re: (In)transitive verbs

I'm not quite sure for English, but in French, "nager"
(to swim) is normally intransitive. Nevertheless, you
can quite normally say "nager la brasse", "nager le
crawl", etc. where the verb looks transitive.

What does "nager le crawl" mean ? It means "to swim
the crawl-way", "to swim *crawly". The direct object
(noun)  stands for an adverbial concept.

So what is transitivity ? What is intransitivity ?
What is a transitive verb, and what not ? It is all
just external appearance and illusion, my brothers.

--- "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...> wrote:
>
> In English, even "sleep" can be transitive.  First,
> you can sleep
> sleep - as in "He sleeps the sleep of the just."
> More recently, you
> have fantasy adventure gaming, in which "to sleep"
> (v.t.) means "cast
> a sleep spell on".  So if you sign onto EverQuest,
> Ultima Online,
> Dark Age of Camelot, etc. and listen to the
> intergroup chatter of
> any party involved in a raid, and you'll likely hear
> things like
> "Sleep the big one!"
>
> The distinction itself is straightforward: if the
> verb takes an
> object, it's transitive; if not, it's intransitive.
> English just
> doesn't *make* that distinction sharply; most verbs
> can be either.
> English is also full of phrasal verbs (verb +
> preposition[s]), which
> are transitive when treated as a unit but officially
> analyze into an
> intransitive verb modified by a prepositional
> phrase: "look at",
> "climb up", "watch out for", etc.
>
> -Mark at",
> "climb up", "watch out for", etc.
>
> -Mark

=====
Philippe Caquant

"Le langage est source de malentendus."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

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