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The contents of the Causative alternation page were merged into Labile verb on 21 August 2023. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page. |
I have stopped this article from redirecting to unaccusative verb, as an ergative verb is not the same thing. I've also written an article (probably a stub) on ergative verbs. I'm still adding to it, and will comment further on this talk page later. Ann Heneghan (talk) 16:26, 23 October 2005 (UTC)
As Ann stated, there are Dutch examples as well. This site states a couple of examples: arriveren, barsten, gebeuren, groeien, kapseizen, ontstaan, ontwaken, rimpelen, sneuvelen, stagneren, sterven, struikelen, vallen, verdwijnen, verlopen, verschijnen, verwelken, voorkomen, zinken, zwellen. I think they could be categorised like what was done in the article, but I'm not sure the Dutch categories would be the same. If you need translations of these verbs, more examples, or examples of them in use, or even differences between English and Dutch in this regard, let me know, I'll see what I can find out! -- JoanneB 19:05, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
Where is the notion of "ergative verb" exactly coming from (any references, sources, etc?)? It seems to me that this has not much in common with ergativity. Dixon, 1994: Ergativity calls these verbs ambitransitives (more exactly A=O-ambitransitives) which seems to be a good deal more accurate. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 83.76.168.75 ( talk • contribs) 04:29, 11 June 2007 (UTC).
Though there is something right about saying that ergative verbs "are intransitive verbs with passive meanings", this is also confusing, since as the lead states, an ergative verb "can be either transitive or intransitive" (emphasis mine). An ergative verb is a kind of verb; it is not an inflection or a voice of a verb. Therefore I have removed everything to this effect from the article. I have, however, retained recently added examples. I have also removed links related to ergativity in regards to morphosyntactic alignment, as I think that this only further muddies the waters. (If someone wants to mention in the text that ergative verbs don't have much to do with ergative-absolutive languages and link to these articles within the body of the text, I wouldn't object.) SgtSchumann ( talk) 03:54, 24 October 2008 (UTC)
I'm no linguist, so I don't know what causativity (or some other obscure linguistic term) is, or how it affects the classification of verbs as "this" or "that". But I'm having trouble seeing the difference between an ergative verb and an unaccusative verb. How is the ergative example of "I cook the pasta" vs. "The pasta cooks" any different from the unaccusative example of "The sun melted the ice" vs. "The ice melted"? Both articles compare "It broke the window" and "The window broke" in much the same fashion, and I am just not seeing the difference. I know their definitions are different, but I don't quite get how this applies in practice. Is there something I'm missing? Do these two categories sometimes overlap? When do they not overlap? (It would probably be useful to contrast the ambiguous examples in the two articles with very distinct, non-overlapping examples, to demonstrate a clear difference.) NoriMori ( talk) 03:06, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
Thanks, guys! I mean, neither of your responses really clarified anything for me, but they helped me decide something that I was having trouble with before, which is that I can pretty much use "ergative" and "unaccusative" to mean the same thing. I'll stop stressing about it now. (XD Don't mind me, I'm just conlanging). "...an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose (syntactic) subject is not a (semantic) agent; that is, it does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action of the verb." Still not quite seeing how this is practiceably different from an ergative verb... Oh! I guess the major difference is that an unaccusative verb is intransitive, while an ergative verb can be transitive or intransitive. (Oh, so I can't pretend they're the same...? Darn!) Now that I think of it, I'm actually having trouble seeing the difference between accusativity vs. unergativity... >.< ...Oh. Does the ergativity stuff only apply to ergative-absolutive languages? Could one say that in practice, they're the same, but that their definitions are different because the languages to which they apply have different morphology? P.S. Oh yeah: SgtSchumann, I'm not saying that we shouldn't use "break" as an example; I'm saying that this example, as it appears in both articles, is very ambiguous; and that, if possible, we should add examples that show a more clear difference between ergative verbs and unaccusative verbs. NoriMori ( talk) 18:35, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
I love ergative verbs. I'm actually the main creator of the Wiktionary category (put almost all of its entries in there) (on Wiktionary my name is Language Lover). I just wrote an article about ergative verbs on my blog. Ergative Verbs. Hope you all like it :) Glowing Face Man ( talk) 18:17, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
Dutch is fairly similar to German, and while not having studied Dutch nearly as much as German, intransitive verbs take "sein"/"zijn" automatically. It's hardly surprising that these verbs that can be used intransitively or transitively take "zijn" in the intransitive use. So, I'm not really sure why the article goes out of the way to draw attention to this, like it's something more significant than application of proper Dutch grammar with intransitive verbs. Sure, it looks interesting and significant to English speakers where we lost the use of "be" in intransitive words, but we used to do it as well. "I am come," rather than "I have come." -- Puellanivis ( talk) 02:40, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
The point here is that you can’t use a transitive verb with ‘sein’ because when putting it into passive voice the ‘stative’ variant would collide with this ‘incorrect’ Active Present Perfect Tense.
• Das Buch beschreibt das Leben von XY.
-> Es (das Leben) ist beschrieben...
-> Es (das Buch) hat beschrieben... [correct Present Perfect]
-> Es (das Buch) ist beschrieben... [incorrect Present Perfect]
So you would interpret the incorrect perfect version as a correct passive phrase i.e. that ’the book is described’ rather than ’the book has described‘.
So I think it is an amazing feature in Dutch to add a direct object to the incorrect intransitive phrase
• Ich bin verloren
-> Ich bin mein Geld verloren
and fill this unused empty slot with new meaning without causing any ambiguity whatsoever. Mramosch ( talk) 23:26, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
I'm interested in what seems to me to be the increasing use of ergative verbs in English, primarily in American English, using verbs that used to be simply transitive. For example, Amazon tells its customers that their order has shipped, and printer software tells users that the document is printing. The traditional structure for these meanings would be that the order has been shipped, and that the document is being printed, which are passive structures. The same meaning could also be conveyed more simply with a subject and a transitive verb by saying that 'we have shipped your order' and that 'the printer is printing your document'.
So is this simply economy of phrase, is it laziness, or is it the influence of other languages on English? It certainly seems to be the creation of new ergative verbs, and the original transitive verb is still very much in use.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.103.43.10 ( talk) 20:28, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
Does this deserve a section within the Wikipedia article? I'd be interested in others' views. Christiandbartlett ( talk) 13:28, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
Hi All! This is my first time editing a WP page ever, so it's exciting! :)
I suggest that in the first section of the article ("In English"), these two examples be switched in order so that they'll match the order in which they're named in the preceding sentence.
So, switching
"[…] to break the window […]" or "[…] for the burglar to break the window […]" <-- (infinitive) "[…] the breaking of the window […]" or "[…] the breaking of the window by the burglar […]" <-- (nominalization)
to
"[…] the breaking of the window […]" or "[…] the breaking of the window by the burglar […]" <-- (nominalization) "[…] to break the window […]" or "[…] for the burglar to break the window […]" <-- (infinitive)
in order to match the order of the labels that are given for these examples in this sentence:
"Unlike a passive verb, a nominalization, an infinitive, or a gerund, which would allow the agent to be deleted but would also allow it to be included, the intransitive version of an ergative verb requires the agent to be deleted:"
(And, out of curiosity, what happens now? If the proposed change is generally accepted, who actually makes the change in the article? Is it expected to be me, since I proposed it, or is there a designated admin that is in charge of making the changes?) Marybee3 ( talk) 16:33, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
As has been noted in the discussions above, there doesn't really seem to be a clear-cut definition between "ergative" and "unaccusative", and "ergative" seems to be used to refer to both concepts. The current definition given on this page seems to mix ergativity (the property of aligning patient with subject) with ambitransitivity (the property of having an optional object). However, I don't think that there is really such a sharp distinction in terminology, or at least I do not believe that this distinction reflects a majority view or common usage. In Dutch linguistics, for example, the standard term for a verb whose intransitive subject is a patient is "ergative", regardless of whether it may also be used transitively. I therefore propose that the two pages be merged and that less WP:UNDUE weight be given to the distinction of having an optional object or not, unless it can be clearly established that this distinction reflects common linguistic usage and not just one particular point of view. CodeCat ( talk) 00:13, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
An addition: I was originally considering also proposing a parallel merger of Unergative verb into Accusative verb, but those two articles don't have much content, and may seem like a good idea to merge all four articles into a single one named Accusative and ergative verb(s). If you agree to this four-way merger, please say so in your reply. CodeCat ( talk) 00:20, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
The syntactic structures of ergative vs unaccusative sentences in Minimalist syntax are very different. Regardless of the theory, the theta roles involved with each type of verb are very different. See "Core Syntax" by Adger. Aside from unergative verbs like "run", many verbs come in ergative/unergative pairs. e.g. unergative - "The door closed." ergative - "I closed the door." Verbs with ergativity can have agents, but unaccusatives cannot. E.g. the unaccusative verb "fall" in "Mary fell", "Mary" is the theme, not the agent, I also can't say "I fall Mary" to mean that I made Mary fall. When I have time I will try to return to these pages and make the distinction more clear. Rue-chan ( talk) 23:33, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
This article is almost entirely unsourced.
Moreover, some of its foundational reasoning is flawed.
Given this fundamental confusion in the basis for describing ergative verbs, the rest of the article is somewhat less than clear.
I'd like to request that someone get their hands on decent source material and rewrite this whole article. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:44, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
There are, I believe, genuine Unakkusativ verbs, such as seem, happen. These cannot take an 'object', yet the 'subject' doing the 'verbing' is completely inaktiv. The examples used in the article are however clearly ergative. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.94.132.231 ( talk) 23:48, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
I've been puzzled for some time about this article as it describes a usage of 'ergative' that I've never come across in any linguistic work. I work with Australian languages so i'm pretty familiar with ergativity as argument structure and case of subject of a transitive verb. I've just found that the Oxford concise dictionary of linguistics does mention the term 'ergative verb' as is used in this article, says it is a sporadic usage that arose in the 1960s, and claims that it appears to have arisen (at least partly) from a misunderstanding of the more standard usage of 'ergative'. The entry finishes with the suggestion that the usage as in this article '...could perhaps with benefit be avoided.' I'm not sure what that means for this article though, but perhaps it should state that it 'ergative verb' is not a term used in mainstream linguistics? Dougg ( talk) 04:46, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
Ok, interesting, I'll have to check more linguistics dictionaries. I don't see the need for the term as the usual specific designation for this type of verb (if treated as single words) would be 'ambitransitive verb'. But usually pairs of verbs of this kind are considered to be two different words that are formally identical, so each would have their own dictionary entry (of course, not unusual in English with so much zero-derivation). Either way it seems confusing that 'ergative' be used in this way, and I see little evidence that many linguists use this terminology, although I grant that it seems to have be more common in ESL. Dougg ( talk)
Instead of contributing to the individual posts about the ongoing confusion about the terminology regarding to verbs of the categories ‘ergative-unergative-unaccusative etc.’ from 2005 to 2016 I decided to sum it up in a dedicated entry. However, I won’t be touching the definition of whether verbs like ‘to eat’ are considered to be intransitive or transitive when used without a direct object.
The following concise but rather over-simplified definitions do not necessarily reflect my opinion or preferred choices but they give a reasonable explanation why these terms can be considered valid when used for naming a certain type or category of verbs, even when only being considered to be suboptimal by some people.
The schematics of INTRANSITIVITY
The schematics of TRANSITIVITY
I know I am pretty late to the party but future visitors might find a condensed solution helpful.
Mramosch (
talk)
04:12, 13 July 2019 (UTC)
@Austronesier: I totally agree, I think a clear schematic overview does help people much more than individual split up articles, because the confusing element is distinguishing a term used for a group of categories from an actual category itself.
Unaccusative verbs are not to be compared with ergative verbs, which themselves should not be compared to anti-causative verbs etc. - we are talking groups, sub-groups and then actual categories here. That’s what needs to be understood.
I really tried to avoid any ambiguity, using words like e.g. ’variants’ instead of referring to everything as a verb.
I would really like to insert a diagram here that would make it even more obvious that it is actually not that complicated at all. Could you give me a hint on how to do this, or do talks not take inline images at all? Mramosch ( talk) 13:16, 13 July 2019 (UTC)
The current version contains:
”When causatively alternating verbs are used intransitively, they are referred to as anticausatives or inchoatives because the intransitive variant describes a situation in which the theme participant (in this case "the door") undergoes a change of state, becoming, for example, "opened".”
The reference to a door that opened has no introduction in the preceding text. Redav ( talk) 13:17, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||
|
The contents of the Causative alternation page were merged into Labile verb on 21 August 2023. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page. |
I have stopped this article from redirecting to unaccusative verb, as an ergative verb is not the same thing. I've also written an article (probably a stub) on ergative verbs. I'm still adding to it, and will comment further on this talk page later. Ann Heneghan (talk) 16:26, 23 October 2005 (UTC)
As Ann stated, there are Dutch examples as well. This site states a couple of examples: arriveren, barsten, gebeuren, groeien, kapseizen, ontstaan, ontwaken, rimpelen, sneuvelen, stagneren, sterven, struikelen, vallen, verdwijnen, verlopen, verschijnen, verwelken, voorkomen, zinken, zwellen. I think they could be categorised like what was done in the article, but I'm not sure the Dutch categories would be the same. If you need translations of these verbs, more examples, or examples of them in use, or even differences between English and Dutch in this regard, let me know, I'll see what I can find out! -- JoanneB 19:05, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
Where is the notion of "ergative verb" exactly coming from (any references, sources, etc?)? It seems to me that this has not much in common with ergativity. Dixon, 1994: Ergativity calls these verbs ambitransitives (more exactly A=O-ambitransitives) which seems to be a good deal more accurate. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 83.76.168.75 ( talk • contribs) 04:29, 11 June 2007 (UTC).
Though there is something right about saying that ergative verbs "are intransitive verbs with passive meanings", this is also confusing, since as the lead states, an ergative verb "can be either transitive or intransitive" (emphasis mine). An ergative verb is a kind of verb; it is not an inflection or a voice of a verb. Therefore I have removed everything to this effect from the article. I have, however, retained recently added examples. I have also removed links related to ergativity in regards to morphosyntactic alignment, as I think that this only further muddies the waters. (If someone wants to mention in the text that ergative verbs don't have much to do with ergative-absolutive languages and link to these articles within the body of the text, I wouldn't object.) SgtSchumann ( talk) 03:54, 24 October 2008 (UTC)
I'm no linguist, so I don't know what causativity (or some other obscure linguistic term) is, or how it affects the classification of verbs as "this" or "that". But I'm having trouble seeing the difference between an ergative verb and an unaccusative verb. How is the ergative example of "I cook the pasta" vs. "The pasta cooks" any different from the unaccusative example of "The sun melted the ice" vs. "The ice melted"? Both articles compare "It broke the window" and "The window broke" in much the same fashion, and I am just not seeing the difference. I know their definitions are different, but I don't quite get how this applies in practice. Is there something I'm missing? Do these two categories sometimes overlap? When do they not overlap? (It would probably be useful to contrast the ambiguous examples in the two articles with very distinct, non-overlapping examples, to demonstrate a clear difference.) NoriMori ( talk) 03:06, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
Thanks, guys! I mean, neither of your responses really clarified anything for me, but they helped me decide something that I was having trouble with before, which is that I can pretty much use "ergative" and "unaccusative" to mean the same thing. I'll stop stressing about it now. (XD Don't mind me, I'm just conlanging). "...an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose (syntactic) subject is not a (semantic) agent; that is, it does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action of the verb." Still not quite seeing how this is practiceably different from an ergative verb... Oh! I guess the major difference is that an unaccusative verb is intransitive, while an ergative verb can be transitive or intransitive. (Oh, so I can't pretend they're the same...? Darn!) Now that I think of it, I'm actually having trouble seeing the difference between accusativity vs. unergativity... >.< ...Oh. Does the ergativity stuff only apply to ergative-absolutive languages? Could one say that in practice, they're the same, but that their definitions are different because the languages to which they apply have different morphology? P.S. Oh yeah: SgtSchumann, I'm not saying that we shouldn't use "break" as an example; I'm saying that this example, as it appears in both articles, is very ambiguous; and that, if possible, we should add examples that show a more clear difference between ergative verbs and unaccusative verbs. NoriMori ( talk) 18:35, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
I love ergative verbs. I'm actually the main creator of the Wiktionary category (put almost all of its entries in there) (on Wiktionary my name is Language Lover). I just wrote an article about ergative verbs on my blog. Ergative Verbs. Hope you all like it :) Glowing Face Man ( talk) 18:17, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
Dutch is fairly similar to German, and while not having studied Dutch nearly as much as German, intransitive verbs take "sein"/"zijn" automatically. It's hardly surprising that these verbs that can be used intransitively or transitively take "zijn" in the intransitive use. So, I'm not really sure why the article goes out of the way to draw attention to this, like it's something more significant than application of proper Dutch grammar with intransitive verbs. Sure, it looks interesting and significant to English speakers where we lost the use of "be" in intransitive words, but we used to do it as well. "I am come," rather than "I have come." -- Puellanivis ( talk) 02:40, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
The point here is that you can’t use a transitive verb with ‘sein’ because when putting it into passive voice the ‘stative’ variant would collide with this ‘incorrect’ Active Present Perfect Tense.
• Das Buch beschreibt das Leben von XY.
-> Es (das Leben) ist beschrieben...
-> Es (das Buch) hat beschrieben... [correct Present Perfect]
-> Es (das Buch) ist beschrieben... [incorrect Present Perfect]
So you would interpret the incorrect perfect version as a correct passive phrase i.e. that ’the book is described’ rather than ’the book has described‘.
So I think it is an amazing feature in Dutch to add a direct object to the incorrect intransitive phrase
• Ich bin verloren
-> Ich bin mein Geld verloren
and fill this unused empty slot with new meaning without causing any ambiguity whatsoever. Mramosch ( talk) 23:26, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
I'm interested in what seems to me to be the increasing use of ergative verbs in English, primarily in American English, using verbs that used to be simply transitive. For example, Amazon tells its customers that their order has shipped, and printer software tells users that the document is printing. The traditional structure for these meanings would be that the order has been shipped, and that the document is being printed, which are passive structures. The same meaning could also be conveyed more simply with a subject and a transitive verb by saying that 'we have shipped your order' and that 'the printer is printing your document'.
So is this simply economy of phrase, is it laziness, or is it the influence of other languages on English? It certainly seems to be the creation of new ergative verbs, and the original transitive verb is still very much in use.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.103.43.10 ( talk) 20:28, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
Does this deserve a section within the Wikipedia article? I'd be interested in others' views. Christiandbartlett ( talk) 13:28, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
Hi All! This is my first time editing a WP page ever, so it's exciting! :)
I suggest that in the first section of the article ("In English"), these two examples be switched in order so that they'll match the order in which they're named in the preceding sentence.
So, switching
"[…] to break the window […]" or "[…] for the burglar to break the window […]" <-- (infinitive) "[…] the breaking of the window […]" or "[…] the breaking of the window by the burglar […]" <-- (nominalization)
to
"[…] the breaking of the window […]" or "[…] the breaking of the window by the burglar […]" <-- (nominalization) "[…] to break the window […]" or "[…] for the burglar to break the window […]" <-- (infinitive)
in order to match the order of the labels that are given for these examples in this sentence:
"Unlike a passive verb, a nominalization, an infinitive, or a gerund, which would allow the agent to be deleted but would also allow it to be included, the intransitive version of an ergative verb requires the agent to be deleted:"
(And, out of curiosity, what happens now? If the proposed change is generally accepted, who actually makes the change in the article? Is it expected to be me, since I proposed it, or is there a designated admin that is in charge of making the changes?) Marybee3 ( talk) 16:33, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
As has been noted in the discussions above, there doesn't really seem to be a clear-cut definition between "ergative" and "unaccusative", and "ergative" seems to be used to refer to both concepts. The current definition given on this page seems to mix ergativity (the property of aligning patient with subject) with ambitransitivity (the property of having an optional object). However, I don't think that there is really such a sharp distinction in terminology, or at least I do not believe that this distinction reflects a majority view or common usage. In Dutch linguistics, for example, the standard term for a verb whose intransitive subject is a patient is "ergative", regardless of whether it may also be used transitively. I therefore propose that the two pages be merged and that less WP:UNDUE weight be given to the distinction of having an optional object or not, unless it can be clearly established that this distinction reflects common linguistic usage and not just one particular point of view. CodeCat ( talk) 00:13, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
An addition: I was originally considering also proposing a parallel merger of Unergative verb into Accusative verb, but those two articles don't have much content, and may seem like a good idea to merge all four articles into a single one named Accusative and ergative verb(s). If you agree to this four-way merger, please say so in your reply. CodeCat ( talk) 00:20, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
The syntactic structures of ergative vs unaccusative sentences in Minimalist syntax are very different. Regardless of the theory, the theta roles involved with each type of verb are very different. See "Core Syntax" by Adger. Aside from unergative verbs like "run", many verbs come in ergative/unergative pairs. e.g. unergative - "The door closed." ergative - "I closed the door." Verbs with ergativity can have agents, but unaccusatives cannot. E.g. the unaccusative verb "fall" in "Mary fell", "Mary" is the theme, not the agent, I also can't say "I fall Mary" to mean that I made Mary fall. When I have time I will try to return to these pages and make the distinction more clear. Rue-chan ( talk) 23:33, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
This article is almost entirely unsourced.
Moreover, some of its foundational reasoning is flawed.
Given this fundamental confusion in the basis for describing ergative verbs, the rest of the article is somewhat less than clear.
I'd like to request that someone get their hands on decent source material and rewrite this whole article. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:44, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
There are, I believe, genuine Unakkusativ verbs, such as seem, happen. These cannot take an 'object', yet the 'subject' doing the 'verbing' is completely inaktiv. The examples used in the article are however clearly ergative. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.94.132.231 ( talk) 23:48, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
I've been puzzled for some time about this article as it describes a usage of 'ergative' that I've never come across in any linguistic work. I work with Australian languages so i'm pretty familiar with ergativity as argument structure and case of subject of a transitive verb. I've just found that the Oxford concise dictionary of linguistics does mention the term 'ergative verb' as is used in this article, says it is a sporadic usage that arose in the 1960s, and claims that it appears to have arisen (at least partly) from a misunderstanding of the more standard usage of 'ergative'. The entry finishes with the suggestion that the usage as in this article '...could perhaps with benefit be avoided.' I'm not sure what that means for this article though, but perhaps it should state that it 'ergative verb' is not a term used in mainstream linguistics? Dougg ( talk) 04:46, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
Ok, interesting, I'll have to check more linguistics dictionaries. I don't see the need for the term as the usual specific designation for this type of verb (if treated as single words) would be 'ambitransitive verb'. But usually pairs of verbs of this kind are considered to be two different words that are formally identical, so each would have their own dictionary entry (of course, not unusual in English with so much zero-derivation). Either way it seems confusing that 'ergative' be used in this way, and I see little evidence that many linguists use this terminology, although I grant that it seems to have be more common in ESL. Dougg ( talk)
Instead of contributing to the individual posts about the ongoing confusion about the terminology regarding to verbs of the categories ‘ergative-unergative-unaccusative etc.’ from 2005 to 2016 I decided to sum it up in a dedicated entry. However, I won’t be touching the definition of whether verbs like ‘to eat’ are considered to be intransitive or transitive when used without a direct object.
The following concise but rather over-simplified definitions do not necessarily reflect my opinion or preferred choices but they give a reasonable explanation why these terms can be considered valid when used for naming a certain type or category of verbs, even when only being considered to be suboptimal by some people.
The schematics of INTRANSITIVITY
The schematics of TRANSITIVITY
I know I am pretty late to the party but future visitors might find a condensed solution helpful.
Mramosch (
talk)
04:12, 13 July 2019 (UTC)
@Austronesier: I totally agree, I think a clear schematic overview does help people much more than individual split up articles, because the confusing element is distinguishing a term used for a group of categories from an actual category itself.
Unaccusative verbs are not to be compared with ergative verbs, which themselves should not be compared to anti-causative verbs etc. - we are talking groups, sub-groups and then actual categories here. That’s what needs to be understood.
I really tried to avoid any ambiguity, using words like e.g. ’variants’ instead of referring to everything as a verb.
I would really like to insert a diagram here that would make it even more obvious that it is actually not that complicated at all. Could you give me a hint on how to do this, or do talks not take inline images at all? Mramosch ( talk) 13:16, 13 July 2019 (UTC)
The current version contains:
”When causatively alternating verbs are used intransitively, they are referred to as anticausatives or inchoatives because the intransitive variant describes a situation in which the theme participant (in this case "the door") undergoes a change of state, becoming, for example, "opened".”
The reference to a door that opened has no introduction in the preceding text. Redav ( talk) 13:17, 7 September 2023 (UTC)