Re: (In)transitive verbs
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, February 6, 2004, 3:23 |
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On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 09:42:43PM -0500, Trebor Jung wrote:
> Merhaba!
>
> Could anyone give me a list of verbs classified as transitive or
> intransitive (or both)? English transitivity is confusing, since verbbs
> are so flexible. I have a language where I'm distinguishing this feature
> but don't know which verbs are which; only some, like 'sleep', are
> obvious.
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
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