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Transitivity and valency
Transitivity
Intransitive verb
Transitive verb
Ambitransitive verb
Valency
Impersonal (Avalent)
Intransitive verb (Monovalent)
Monotransitive (Divalent)
Ditransitive verb (Trivalent)
Tritransitive verb (Quadrivalent)
Valence increasing
Causative
Applicative
Benefactive
Dative shift
Valence decreasing
Passive
Antipassive
Impersonal passive
Reflexives and reciprocals
Reflexive pronoun
Reflexive verb
Reciprocal construction
Reciprocal pronoun
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In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb, aside from an auxiliary verb, whose context does not entail a transitive object. That lack of an object distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additionally, intransitive verbs are typically considered within a class apart from modal verbs and defective verbs.

Examples

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In the following sentences, verbs are used without a direct object:

  • "Rivers flow."
  • "I sneezed."
  • "My dog ran."
  • "Water evaporates when it's hot."
  • "You've grown since I last saw you!"
  • "I wonder how long it will be until I see you again after I move."

The following sentences contain transitive verbs (they entail one or more objects):

  • "We watched a movie last night."
  • "She's making promises."
  • "When I said that, my sister smacked me."
  • "Santa gave me a present."
  • "He continuously clicked his pen and it was incredibly annoying to me."

Some verbs, called ambitransitive verbs, may entail objects but do not always require one. Such a verb may be used as intransitive in one sentence, and as transitive in another.

Intransitive Transitive
"It is raining." "It is raining cats and dogs."
"When he finished the race, he vomited." "When he finished the race, he vomited up his lunch."
"Water evaporates when it's hot." "Heat evaporates water."
"He's been singing all day." "He's been singing barbershop all day."
"You've grown since I last saw you." "You've grown a beard since I last saw you!"

In general, intransitive verbs often involve weather terms, involuntary processes, states, bodily functions, motion, action processes, cognition, sensation, and emotion.[1]: 54–61 

Valency-changing operations

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The valency of a verb is related to transitivity. Where the transitivity of a verb only considers the objects, the valency of a verb considers all the arguments that correspond to a verb, including both the subject of the verb and all of the objects.

It is possible to change the contextually indicated sense of a verb from transitive to intransitive, and in so doing to change the valency.

In languages that have a passive voice, a transitive verb in the active voice becomes intransitive in the passive voice. For example, consider the following sentence:

David hugged Mary.

In this sentence, "hugged" is a transitive verb with "Mary" as its object. The sentence can be made passive with the direct object "Mary" as the grammatical subject as follows:

Mary was hugged.

This shift is called promotion of the object.

The passive-voice construction does not indicate an object. The passivized sentence could be continued with the agent:

Mary was hugged by David.

It cannot be continued with a direct object to be taken by "was hugged". For example, it would be ungrammatical to write "Mary was hugged her daughter" to show that Mary and her daughter shared a hug.

Intransitive verbs can be rephrased as passive constructs in some languages. In English, intransitive verbs can be used in the passive voice when a prepositional phrase is included, as in, "The houses were lived in by millions of people."

Some languages, such as Dutch, have an impersonal passive voice that lets an intransitive verb without a prepositional phrase be passive. In German, a sentence such as "The children sleep" can be made passive to remove the subject and becomes, "It is slept." However, no addition like "... by the children" is possible in such cases.

In languages with ergative–absolutive alignment, the passive voice (where the object of a transitive verb becomes the subject of an intransitive verb) does not make sense, because the noun associated with the intransitive verb is marked as the object, not as the subject. Instead, these often have an antipassive voice. In this context, the subject of a transitive verb is promoted to the "object" of the corresponding intransitive verb. In the context of a nominative–accusative language like English, this promotion is nonsensical because intransitive verbs do not entail objects, they entail subjects. So, the subject of a transitive verb ("I" in I hug him) is also the subject of the intransitive passive construction (I was hugged by him). But in an ergative–absolutive language like Dyirbal, "I" in the transitive I hug him would involve the ergative case, but the "I" in I was hugged would involve the absolutive, and so by analogy the antipassive construction more closely resembles *was hugged me. Thus in this example, the ergative is promoted to the absolutive, and the agent (i.e., him), which was formerly marked by the absolutive, is deleted to form the antipassive voice (or is marked in a different way, in the same way that in the English passive voice can still be specified as the agent of the action using by him in I was hugged by him—for example, Dyirbal puts the agent in the dative case, and Basque retains the agent in the absolutive).

Ambitransitivity

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Main article: Ambitransitive verb

In many languages, there are "ambitransitive" verbs, which can occur either in a transitive or intransitive sense. For example, English play is ambitransitive, since it is grammatical to say His son plays, and it is also grammatical to say His son plays guitar. English is rather flexible as regards verb valency, and so it has a high number of ambitransitive verbs; other languages are more rigid and require explicit valency changing operations (voice, causative morphology, etc.) to transform a verb from intransitive to transitive or vice versa.

In some ambitransitive verbs are ergative verbs for which the alignment of the syntactic arguments to the semantic roles is exchanged. An example of this is the verb break in English.

(1) He broke the cup.
(2) The cup broke.

In (1), the verb is transitive, and the subject is the agent of the action, i.e. the performer of the action of breaking the cup. 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. In fact, the patient is the same in both sentences, and sentence (2) is an example of implicit middle voice. This has also been termed an anticausative or inchoative, indicating a change of state without an external cause.

Other alternating intransitive verbs in English are change and sink.

In the Romance languages, these verbs are often called pseudo-reflexive, because they are signaled in the same way as reflexive verbs, using the clitic particle se. Compare the following (in Spanish):

(3a) La taza se rompió. ("The cup broke.")
(3b) El barco se hundió. ("The boat sank.")
(4a) Ella se miró en el espejo. ("She looked at herself in the mirror.")
(4b) El gato se lava. ("The cat washes itself.")

Sentences (3a) and (3b) show Romance pseudo-reflexive phrases, corresponding to English alternating intransitives. As in The cup broke, they are inherently without an agent; their deep structure does not and can not contain one. The action is not reflexive (as in (4a) and (4b)) because it is not performed by the subject; it just happens to it. Therefore, this is not the same as passive voice, where an intransitive verb phrase appears, but there is an implicit agent (which can be made explicit using a complement phrase):

(5) La copa estaba rota (por el niño). ("The cup was broken (by the child).")
(6) El barco fue hundido (por piratas). ("The boat was sunk (by pirates).")

Other ambitransitive verbs (like eat) are not of the alternating type; the subject is always the agent of the action, and the object is simply optional. A few verbs are of both types at once, like read: compare I read, I read a magazine, and this magazine reads easily.

Some languages like Japanese have different forms of certain verbs to show transitivity. For example, there are two forms of the verb "to start":

(7) 会議が始まる。 (Kaigi ga hajimaru., "The meeting starts.")
(8) 会長が会議を始める。 (Kaichō ga kaigi o hajimeru., "The president starts the meeting.")

In Japanese, the form of the verb indicates the number of arguments the sentence needs to have.[2]

Unaccusative and unergative verbs

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Main articles: Unaccusative verb and Unergative verb

Especially in some languages, it makes sense to classify intransitive verbs as:

  • unaccusative when the subject is not an agent; that is, it does not actively initiate the action of the verb (e.g. "die", "fall").
    • Unaccusative verbs are typically used to show action or movement.
      • Examples:
        • I arrived at the party around 8 o'clock.
        • Do you know what time the plane departed?
        • The disease spread to other towns.[3]
        • I sat on the train.
        • I was in a car accident and the other person appeared out of no where.
  • unergative when they have an agent subject.
    • Examples:
      • I am going to resign from my position at the bank.
      • I have to run six miles in the morning.
      • John ate.[4]

This distinction may in some cases be reflected in the grammar, where for instance different auxiliary verbs may be used for the two categories.

Cognate objects

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Main article: Cognate object

In many languages, including English, some or all intransitive verbs can entail cognate objects—objects formed from the same roots as the verbs themselves; for example, the verb sleep is ordinarily intransitive, but one can say, "He slept a troubled sleep", meaning roughly "He slept, and his sleep was troubled."

Other languages

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In Pingelapese, a Micronesian language, intransitive verb sentence structure is often used, with no object attached. There must be a stative or active verb to have an intransitive sentence. A stative verb has a person or an object that is directly influenced by a verb. An active verb has the direct action performed by the subject. The word order that is most commonly associated with intransitive sentences is subject-verb. However, verb-subject is used if the verb is unaccusative or by discourse pragmatics.[5]

In Tokelauan, the noun phrases used with verbs are required when verbs are placed in groups. Verbs are divided into two major groups. Every verbal sentence must have that structure, which contains a singular noun phrase, without a preposition, called an unmarked noun phrase. Only if a ko-phrase precedes the predicate, that rule may be ignored. The agent is what speakers of the language call the person who is performing the action of the verb. If a noun phrase that starts with the preposition e is able to express the agent, and the receiving person or thing that the agent is performing the action of the verb to is expressed by a singular noun phrase that lack a preposition, or unmarked noun phrase, the verb is then considered transitive. All other verbs are considered intransitive.[6]

See also

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References

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Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Intransitive verb

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In , an intransitive is a that does not require a direct object to complete its meaning, typically expressing an action or state involving only the subject. These verbs form the core of simple where the action does not transfer to another entity, distinguishing them from transitive verbs that necessitate an object to receive the action. Common examples include sleep, arrive, and die, as in the sentences "The child sleeps" or "The meeting arrived on time." Intransitive verbs can often appear at the end of a or be followed by optional elements such as adverbs, prepositional phrases, or other to add details about manner, time, or place, but they cannot take a or as a direct complement. For instance, in "She laughed loudly in the room," laughed is intransitive, with loudly and in the room serving as rather than objects. This structure contrasts with transitive constructions, where omitting the object results in an incomplete sentence, and intransitive verbs notably cannot form equivalents. Many verbs exhibit ambitransitivity, allowing them to function as either transitive or intransitive based on , such as run in "They run daily" (intransitive) versus "They run a " (transitive). In linguistic analysis, intransitive verbs are further subdivided into unaccusative (often involving change of state, like fall) and unergative (typically agent-driven activities, like work) categories, which influence syntactic patterns such as subject properties and selection in languages like Italian or French. Understanding these distinctions is essential for constructing grammatically correct sentences and analyzing verb valency across languages.

Fundamentals

Definition

An intransitive verb is a verb that does not require a direct object to complete its meaning, typically forming a complete with only a subject in the syntactic pattern of Subject + . This distinguishes it from other verb types by limiting the verb's valency to one , the subject, without transferring action to an additional recipient. The term "intransitive" originates from Late Latin intransitīvus, meaning "not passing over," derived from in- ("not") + trānsitīvus ("passing over," as in transitive), reflecting the verb's lack of action transfer to an object. It entered English grammatical terminology in the 17th century, building on classical Latin traditions of classifying verbs by their ability to govern objects. Basic syntactic tests identify intransitive verbs through their resistance to certain transformations. For instance, they cannot undergo passivization, as there is no direct object available to promote to subject position, unlike transitive verbs that permit such restructuring. Additionally, attempting to introduce a direct object typically alters the verb's core meaning or requires a different lexical item, confirming the verb's inherent one-argument structure. In sentence structure, intransitive verbs contribute to economical clause formation by achieving semantic completeness without complements, contrasting with transitive verbs that demand a direct object to fully express the action. This role underscores their foundational place in , enabling simple declarative sentences focused on the subject's action or state.

Comparison with Transitive Verbs

Intransitive verbs differ fundamentally from in their syntactic requirements, as they form complete using only a subject as the core , without needing a direct object. For instance, the sentence "She sleeps" is syntactically complete with the intransitive verb "sleeps" and its subject "she," whereas a transitive verb like "eats" requires a direct object to complete the , as in "She eats an apple." This distinction arises because intransitive verbs denote one-participant events, limiting their argument structure to a single core role, typically filled by the subject in subject-verb (SV) order in languages like English. Semantically, intransitive verbs assign a single thematic role to their subject, such as an agent (for volitional actions) or a theme (for non-volitional states), reflecting situations involving only one participant. In contrast, transitive verbs encode two-participant events, assigning distinct roles like agent to the subject (the instigator) and or theme to the object (the affected ), as in "The chef cooked the meal," where "chef" is the agent and "meal" the . This semantic asymmetry highlights how transitivity correlates with the complexity of event representation, with intransitives focusing on internal or self-contained actions. Grammatically, these differences lead to distinct behavioral patterns, such as the inability of intransitive verbs to undergo passivization, since there is no object to promote to subject position; attempts like "*The city was arrived by the train" are ungrammatical in English. Transitive verbs, however, readily form passives, e.g., "The apple was eaten by her," demoting the agent and promoting . Additionally, intransitives lack extensions into ditransitive structures, which require two objects (direct and indirect) and are a feature of certain transitive verbs, like "give" in "She gave him a ."
Verb TypeRequired ArgumentsExample SentencePassivization Possibility
IntransitiveSubject only (S)She sleeps.No (*She was slept.)
TransitiveSubject + object (A + O)She eats an apple.Yes (An apple was eaten by her.)

Examples

In English

In English, intransitive verbs are those that do not require a direct object to complete their meaning, forming complete predicates with just a subject. Common examples include arrive, die, laugh, sleep, and walk. For instance: "The train arrives on time," "She died peacefully," "He laughed heartily," "The baby sleeps soundly," and "They walk daily." These verbs express actions or states that are self-contained, relying on the subject's role to convey full semantic content. Intransitive verbs in English can be categorized by semantic types, reflecting their core meanings and usage patterns. Verbs of motion, such as run ("The dog runs in the park") and walk, denote movement without specifying a goal or endpoint in the basic form. Verbs of state, like exist ("God exists") and sleep, describe conditions or existence. Verbs of change of state include fall ("The leaves fall in autumn") and die, indicating transitions in condition or location. Verbs of emission, such as sneeze ("She sneezes loudly") and laugh, express the release of sound or substance. These categories highlight how intransitives capture diverse aspects of experience without needing an object. The historical evolution of intransitive verbs in English traces from the synthetic structures of to the analytic forms of . In , verb valency was often marked through rich inflectional endings and case systems on nouns, allowing flexible while indicating roles syntactically. Over time, particularly during the period, the loss of inflections due to phonological erosion and Norman influence shifted English toward analytic constructions, where prepositions, auxiliaries, and fixed subject-verb-object order clarify intransitive usage without morphological cues. This transition resulted in modern intransitives that depend more on syntactic position for completeness. Corpus studies, such as those analyzing the (BNC), indicate the prevalence of intransitive s in everyday language across written and spoken genres. Some intransitive s can optionally take objects—nouns derived from the itself—for stylistic emphasis, as in "live a life," though this is a specialized case.

Cognate Objects

A is a that shares an etymological or semantic root with an accompanying intransitive , serving to specify or intensify the action or state denoted by the , often for idiomatic or emphatic purposes. For instance, in constructions like "live a life" or "die a death," the elaborates on the 's meaning without introducing an external affected by the action. This phenomenon is particularly associated with unergative intransitive s, such as those expressing voluntary actions, though it can extend to unaccusatives under specific interpretations. Syntactically, cognate objects do not function as true direct objects, as evidenced by their inability to undergo passivization—for example, "*A laugh was laughed by her" is ungrammatical—or to trigger case assignment typical of transitive complements. Instead, they are often analyzed as adverbial modifiers or adjuncts that provide manner or extent information, occupying a postverbal position without saturating the verb's argument structure. This adjunct status distinguishes them from genuine objects, as they resist pronominalization (e.g., "*She laughed it") and co-occur with additional adverbials without conflict. Examples illustrate this across verb types: with action-oriented unergatives like "sing a song" or "laugh a hearty laugh," the cognate object emphasizes the activity; with unaccusatives such as "die the ," it specifies the event's in a more sense. State-like verbs, such as "," similarly employ them for intensification, though such uses are less common. Historically, these constructions evolved from compound forms, becoming more productive in around the 13th century, often shifting from referential to non-referential event nouns in . Constraints limit cognate objects to a subset of intransitive verbs, primarily those allowing internal aspectual specification, and they frequently appear in fossilized or idiomatic expressions rather than productively with all intransitives. For example, verbs like "run" permit "run a race," but arbitrary extensions such as "*sleep a " are rare and archaic. This non-productive nature ties their distribution to lexical idiosyncrasies and historical processes, such as the development of progressive aspects in English.

Theoretical Distinctions

Ambitransitivity

Ambitransitive verbs, also referred to as labile verbs, are those that can function both intransitively, without a direct object, and transitively, with a direct object, using the identical form without any morphological alterations such as affixes or auxiliaries. This alternation allows the same to express varying argument structures depending on , a particularly prevalent in English where the 's core semantics adapt flexibly to the presence or absence of an object. For instance, the "read" appears intransitively in "She reads daily" to denote the general activity, or transitively in "She reads a " to specify the object involved. Two primary types of ambitransitive verbs are distinguished based on their semantic and structural behavior. Labile verbs feature an optional object where omission does not substantially alter the event's meaning, often implying an indefinite or contextually recoverable object in the intransitive use; examples include "eat" as in "They eat voraciously" versus "They eat ," or "run" in "She runs marathons" transitively compared to "She runs every morning" intransitively. In contrast, causative-inchoative alternations involve verbs denoting a change of state, where the transitive form expresses an agent causing the change and the intransitive form indicates a spontaneous occurrence; representative cases are "break," as in "The broke the " (causative) versus "The broke" (inchoative), or "open" in "He opened the " compared to "The opened." Syntactically, ambitransitive verbs are identifiable through tests confirming the optionality of the direct object, where its omission leaves the verb's tense, voice, and subject agreement unchanged, maintaining active voice throughout. This contrasts with strictly transitive verbs that require an object for grammaticality. Common English examples demonstrating this include "eat," "run," and "open," where the transitive frame reduces to without structural disruption. Semantically, these verbs frequently exhibit shifts in agentivity, with the transitive variant assigning an agent to the subject as the initiator of the action, while the intransitive form promotes the subject to a theme or role, often evoking a sense of spontaneity or implicit reflexivity akin to a middle voice interpretation. In labile cases, the intransitive use may imply an underspecified object, preserving activity focus; in causative-inchoative pairs, the alternation highlights causation versus autonomy in event structure. Many such verbs, particularly in causative-inchoative alternations, align with unaccusative classifications in syntactic theory.

Unaccusative and Unergative Verbs

The unaccusative hypothesis posits a fundamental division among intransitive verbs into two subclasses: unaccusatives and unergatives. Unaccusative verbs are those whose surface subject originates as the underlying object in the , functioning semantically as a theme or that undergoes a change, such as in examples like arrive or fall. In contrast, unergative verbs feature a surface subject that is the underlying subject, typically an agent initiating the action, as seen in laugh or run. This distinction was first proposed by in his seminal work on relational grammar, arguing that it accounts for diverse syntactic behaviors across languages. Several diagnostic tests help identify this split. In Italian, ne-clitic movement serves as a key indicator: unaccusative verbs allow the partitive clitic ne to extract from their postverbal subject, as in Ne arrivavano molti ("Many of them arrived"), whereas unergative verbs block it, yielding ungrammaticality in ?Ne ridevano molti ("Many of them laughed"). In English, compatibility with resultative phrases distinguishes the classes; unaccusatives permit secondary predicates predicated of the subject, such as The glass broke to pieces, but unergatives do not, as in the infelicitous ?John laughed to pieces. Similarly, in French, auxiliary selection in compound tenses reveals the divide: unaccusatives select être ("be") with subject agreement, as in Les invités sont arrivés ("The guests have arrived"), while unergatives use avoir ("have"), as in Les invités ont ri ("The guests have laughed"). These tests, elaborated in Luigi Burzio's analysis of Italian syntax, underscore the hypothesis's empirical basis. Within generative syntax, the unaccusative-unergative distinction receives a structural interpretation. Unaccusative verbs involve NP-movement of the underlying object to the subject position to satisfy case requirements, generating a deeper syntactic level absent in unergatives, whose single argument originates in the specifier of the without such advancement. This framework, developed in Burzio's Government-Binding approach, integrates the hypothesis into broader theories of phrase structure and theta-role assignment. Semantically, unaccusatives frequently encode changes of state or , where the subject undergoes telic events without an external causer in the intransitive form, aligning their with internal causation. This pattern contrasts with unergatives, which typically involve manner or agentive activities lacking such inherent endpoints. Beth Levin and Malka Rappaport Hovav's exploration at the syntax-lexical semantics interface highlights how these semantic properties correlate with the syntactic behaviors predicted by the unaccusative hypothesis.

Valency and Transformations

Valency Concepts

In , valency refers to the inherent capacity of a to require or permit a specific number of syntactic arguments in a sentence. Intransitive verbs are characterized by a valency of one, meaning they obligatorily take only a subject as their and do not a direct object. This property distinguishes them from verbs with higher valency requirements, establishing intransitives as the minimal case in verbal . From the perspective of dependency grammar, intransitive verbs function as monovalent predicates within phrase structure, where the verb serves as the head that governs solely its subject dependent, without projecting additional core dependents. This analysis emphasizes the asymmetrical binary relations between words, with the intransitive verb forming a simple dependency tree limited to the subject-verb link. In comparison to higher-valency verbs, intransitives provide a baseline for understanding realization: transitive verbs exhibit valency two by requiring both a subject and a direct object, while ditransitive verbs have valency three, additionally demanding an indirect object. This gradation underscores how valency scales with the number of obligatory actants, positioning intransitives at the foundational level of predicate complexity. The foundational theoretical model for valency is Lucien Tesnière's framework, outlined in his monograph Éléments de syntaxe structurale. Tesnière conceptualized valency in terms of a verb's "hooks" or slots for s—obligatory syntactic elements directly tied to the verb's meaning—while circonstants represent optional that do not affect core valency. For intransitive verbs, this translates to a single obligatory (the subject), with any additional modifiers treated as circonstants. This distinction has profoundly influenced subsequent syntactic theories by prioritizing the verb's role in organizing sentence elements.

Valency-Changing Operations

Valency-changing operations encompass a range of morphological and syntactic processes that alter the argument structure of verbs, often deriving intransitive forms from transitive bases or vice versa. These operations are crucial for expressing nuanced semantic relations, such as the absence of an external causer in events that occur spontaneously. Detransitivization, a primary such process, reduces the valency of a by eliminating its external argument (the causer or agent), resulting in an intransitive construction where the theme or becomes the sole subject. For instance, in English, the transitive verb "open" (as in "She opened the door") can undergo detransitivization to form the anticausative "The door opened," implying an internal or spontaneous cause without specifying an agent. Anticausatives represent a subtype of detransitivization, particularly common in change-of-state verbs, where the focus shifts to the resulting situation rather than the causing event. This alternation is morphologically unmarked in some languages like English but overtly marked in others, such as Russian, where the reflexive suffix -sja derives intransitives from transitives (e.g., "katat’" 'roll (tr.)' becomes "katat’-sja" 'roll (intr.)'). In Spanish, the clitic -se serves as a versatile intransitivizing marker, functioning in anticausative constructions to suppress the external argument, as in "La puerta se abrió" ('The door opened'), derived from the transitive "abrir" ('to open'). This -se can also encode middle voice interpretations, where the verb expresses a property of the subject without an agent, further reducing valency to create intransitive predicates. Passivization provides another inverse mechanism for valency reduction, transforming transitive verbs into intransitives by promoting the object to subject and demoting or omitting the original subject. In English, the active "The boy ate the apple" becomes the passive "The apple was eaten (by the boy)," where the verb now takes only one core argument, rendering it intransitive. Similar patterns occur cross-linguistically; in Spanish, "Los hombres beben el vino" ('The men drink the wine') passivizes to "El vino es bebido por los hombres" ('The wine is drunk by the men'), with the agent optionally expressed as an oblique. This operation maintains the event's semantics but reorients the syntactic structure to emphasize the patient. The productivity of these operations is not uniform across all verbs and is constrained by semantic hierarchies, such as the spontaneity scale proposed by Haspelmath (1993), which ranks verb meanings from high agentivity (e.g., monotransitive actions like 'kill') to low (e.g., agentful processes like 'die'). Verbs higher on the scale (more spontaneous, like 'freeze') tend to favor unmarked causatives and less frequent anticausatives, while those lower (less spontaneous, like 'break') more readily undergo detransitivization to form anticausatives. For example, across 21 languages, 'break'-type verbs show a high anticausative-to-causative (12.50), whereas 'freeze'-type verbs exhibit a low (0.17), reflecting universal tendencies where not all transitives permit detransitivization due to their position on this causation scale. These constraints ensure that valency changes align with the inherent semantics of the verb, preventing ungrammatical derivations in languages with such operations.

Cross-Linguistic Perspectives

In Indo-European Languages

In Indo-European languages, a prominent pattern among intransitive verbs involves auxiliary selection in perfect tenses, where unaccusative intransitives—those denoting change of state or location—typically select the auxiliary "be" rather than "have," distinguishing them from unergatives and transitives. This phenomenon is widespread in both and branches; for instance, in German, unaccusatives like ankommen ("arrive") form the perfect with sein (e.g., Er ist angekommen, "He has arrived"), while unergatives like arbeiten ("work") use haben (e.g., Er hat gearbeitet, "He has worked"). Similarly, in Italian, unaccusatives such as arrivare ("arrive") pair with essere (e.g., È arrivato, "He has arrived"), contrasting with avere for unergatives like lavorare ("work") (e.g., Ha lavorato, "He has worked"). This selection is influenced by , particularly , with telic unaccusatives favoring "be" more consistently than atelic ones, as outlined in the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy. In , particularly English, intransitive verbs exhibit a high frequency of ambitransitivity, where verbs can alternate between transitive and intransitive uses without morphological change, a pattern less prevalent in other Germanic languages like German or Dutch. Examples include (transitive: "The fire burns the wood"; intransitive: "The wood burns") and melt (transitive: "The heat melts the ice"; intransitive: "The ice melts"), reflecting a diachronic increase in labile verbs since , driven by internal processes that expanded this valency flexibility uniquely in English compared to its sister languages. Romance languages frequently employ reflexive markers to derive intransitive constructions from transitive bases, often resulting in pseudo-intransitive or middle voice interpretations that reduce argument structure. In French, for example, se laver ("to wash oneself") uses the reflexive clitic se to create an intransitive verb where the subject acts upon itself, suppressing an external object while maintaining a process-oriented meaning; similar patterns occur in Spanish (lavarse) and Italian (lavarsi), where se merges subject and object roles, functioning as a middle marker for self-affected actions. Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European intransitive verbs featured ablaut patterns that encoded aspectual distinctions, with root vowels alternating to signal versus (completed) aspects in atelic or process-denoting forms. For instance, intransitive like bʰeh₂- ("to flee") showed full-grade e in present stems for ongoing action and zero-grade in for punctual completion, a system integrated into the broader verbal morphology where ablaut interacted with endings to express without dedicated intransitive markers. This inheritance influenced descendant languages' aspectual systems, though simplified over time.

In Non-Indo-European Languages

In non-Indo-European languages, intransitive verbs often exhibit typological patterns that diverge from nominative-accusative alignments, such as split-S systems where the marking of intransitive subjects varies based on the verb's semantics. In some Australian languages, a split-S pattern treats the subject (S) of agentive intransitive verbs (e.g., those implying control or volition, such as "run" or "laugh") like the transitive subject (A) with ergative marking, while non-agentive intransitives (e.g., "fall", "die", or uncontrolled states) align the S with the transitive object (O) using absolutive marking. This semantic split reflects agentivity hierarchies, where volitional actions pattern accusatively and non-volitional ones ergatively. Fluid-S systems in some Australian languages extend this flexibility, allowing contextual choice in S marking within the same clause based on degrees of agentivity, though less rigidly than in split-S. Ergative-absolutive alignment is prominent in isolates like Basque and the Mayan family, where intransitive subjects consistently receive absolutive case, patterning identically with transitive objects and distinct from transitive subjects marked ergative. In Basque, for instance, the intransitive "etortzen da" (comes) marks the subject with absolutive, mirroring the object in transitives like "ikusten du" (sees it), emphasizing the verb's core participant over agenthood. Similarly, in such as Kaqchikel, perfective intransitives like "x-e-wär" (they slept) affix absolutive markers (Set B) to the subject, aligning it with transitive objects, though many Mayans show aspect-based splits where non-perfective contexts shift toward accusative patterns for subjects. This alignment highlights how intransitives in these languages prioritize thematic roles like or undergoer over syntactic subjecthood. In Niger-Congo languages like Akan, serial verb constructions frequently chain intransitive verbs, particularly motion verbs, to encode complex events without introducing objects or coordination markers, treating the sequence as a single predicate with shared arguments. For example, motion verbs such as "kOserE" (borrow/go for) and "hyE" (wear/put on) combine in "Papa no kOserE EkyE hyE" (The man went to borrow a hat and wore it), where both intransitives share the subject and describe sequential subevents within one clause. These constructions allow intransitives to extend valency indirectly through chaining, often incorporating deictic motion to specify directionality, as in "tOO" (buy/arrive for) followed by "twiie" (ride/travel), forming holistic event representations without object licensing. East Asian languages like Japanese employ topic-comment structures that often isolate intransitive verbs in the comment clause, reducing reliance on explicit objects and emphasizing contextual predication over strict argument . In sentences such as "Oosaka-ni-wa gaikoku-jin-ga takusan sunde-iru" (In , many foreigners are living), the topic-marked PP "Oosaka-ni-wa" sets the frame, while the intransitive "sunde-iru" (living/residing) in the comment updates information about the subject without needing an object, leveraging for coherence. This permits intransitives to function independently, as the topic absorbs locative or contextual roles, contrasting with more rigid subject-predicate alignments elsewhere.

References

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