Re: Settle a Bet

On Sun, 24 Feb 2002 20:33:14 -0500 Christopher B Wright
<faceloran@...> writes:
> Question: is "eat" in "she is eating" transitive or intransitive?
> [snip]
> Well, actually, in that example, it's a participle. Noun forms, even of
> verbs, don't have transitivity (transitiveness?), so it's not
transitive
> in another way.
A couple of people said something like this, and I feel like I should
contradict.  From a hyper-traditional grammar this may be true--nouns
don't have transitivity, so neither does a gerund like "eating."  But
that's absurd--"eating" in "She is eating" doesn't function like a noun,
can't be pluralized (!*They are eatings), and doesn't do anything else
noun-like.  It's a verb, plain and simple.  All it did was pass of its
agreement to its sidekick "be" (which is why we call "be" a helping verb)
and take on the gerund morphology.  Still a verb, just in a different
guise.

I argue that even in a sentence like "Eating makes me fat," the word
"eating" is a verb.  That's because you can freely add an object: "Eating
seventy pounds of chocolate makes me fat."  If "eating" is a noun without
transitivity, then what in the world is "seventy pounds of chocolate"?

As a last point, even in Latin and Greek, which provide the basis for our
traditional grammar, gerunds and participles take can take objects and
have transitivity and many of those other verb-properties..


Jesse S. Bangs     Pelíran
jaspax@ juno.com
"Skin and tragedy always attract a crowd."
    --Pedro the Lion

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