View example sentences, synonyms and word forms for Intransitive.
Intransitive
Intransitive meaning
Not transitive: not having, or not taking, a direct object. | Not transitive or passing further; kept; detained. | Of a set of dice: containing three dice A, B, and C, with the property that A rolls higher than B more than half the time, and B rolls higher than C more than half the time, but lacking the property that A rolls higher than C more than half the time. See intransitive dice and intransitive game.
Synonyms of Intransitive
Example sentences (20)
In non-valency marking languages such as English, a transitive verb can often drop its object and become intransitive; or an intransitive verb can take an object and become transitive.
Ambitransitivity main In many languages, there are "ambitransitive" verbs, which can be either transitive or intransitive.
Circular ambiguities arise as a result of the voting paradox —the result of an election can be intransitive (forming a cycle) even though all individual voters expressed a transitive preference.
For example, English play is ambitransitive (both intransitive and transitive), since it is grammatical to say His son plays, and it is also grammatical to say His son plays guitar.
For most main verbs the auxiliary is (the appropriate form of) avoir ("to have"), but for reflexive verbs and certain intransitive verbs the auxiliary is a form of être ("to be").
If a language has no cases, but the word order is AVP or PVA, then a classification may reflect whether the subject of an intransitive verb appears on the same side as the agent or the patient of the transitive verb.
In (2), 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.
Intransitive verbs can be made passive in some languages.
Intransitive verbs may be followed by an adverb (a word that addresses how, where, when, and how often) or end a sentence.
It can also apply to intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, or ditransitive verbs.
Other alternating intransitive verbs in English are change and sink.
Retrograde is also sometimes used as an intransitive verb meaning to become, to appear, to behave or appear to move in a retrograde fashion.
So not only (transitive, intransitive and so-called 'stative') verbs but even nouns often behave like verbs and do not need to have copulas.
So the syntactic category for an intransitive verb is a complex formula representing the fact that the verb acts as a function word requiring an NP as an input and produces a sentence level structure as an output.
Such verbs in Spanish also have a valency of 1. Intransitive and transitive verbs are the most common, but the impersonal and objective verbs are somewhat different from the norm.
The fourth principal part is sometimes omitted for intransitive verbs, but strictly in Latin, they can be made passive if they are used impersonally, and the supine exists for such verbs.
The intransitive protest against in AmE means "to hold or participate in a demonstration against".
Transitive verbs are verbs which may be followed by a direct object : : Intransitive verbs are verbs which can not be followed by an object: : Adjectival verbs are a word class that has no equivalent in English.
Trudgill and Hannah, International English (4th edition), p. 76. * In speech and in writing, Canadian English speakers permit (and often use) a transitive form for some past tense verbs where only an intransitive form is permitted in most other dialects.
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 (of which there are none for an intransitive verb).