‘And although I did a bit of a double-take, I soon got the idea of what was meant by that stunningly ungrammatical sleeps obedience - with its intransitive verb assigned a direct object in defiance of all syntactic decency.’
‘In particular, similar patterns exist for other cases of verbs combining with intransitive prepositions (or ‘particles’, as some people call them).’
‘The combination of verbs with intransitive prepositions is one of the many pseudopods of morphological quasi-regularity that extend into the phrasal domain in English.’
‘We may be confused about this if we do not distinguish, as we clearly should, between transitive and intransitive senses of the verb ‘to move’.’
‘In this respect, adjectives are exactly like intransitive verbs.’
‘An ergative system is one in which the subject of an intransitive verb is treated grammatically like the direct object of a transitive verb, while the subject of a transitive verb is treated differently.’
‘When did it become cooler to be an intransitive verb than a transitive verb?’
‘The real challenges always came with the sophisticated adjectives, the adverbs, and the intransitive verbs.’
‘For me, the intransitive use of ‘bore easily’ is a minor cliché, that is, a phrase I recognize when I see it as a set phrase, even though I might not see it all that often.’
‘Verbs can be either transitive or intransitive a transitive verb governs an object, whereas an intransitive verb does not.’
‘Later she will learn about transitive and intransitive verbs, but in this exercise she could see that the verb cards weren't all alike.’
‘It is inconceivable that Will does not know the difference between a transitive and an intransitive verb.’
‘For the true writer, he had once declared, to write is an intransitive verb: one does not write something, one simply writes.’
‘To give an account of these sentences, a proponent of the equational analysis would have to postulate that the verb is ambiguous between a transitive and an intransitive meaning.’
‘A problem confronting this assumption is the large number of intransitive, unergative verbs in German and English that occur in accomplishment expressions.’
‘Moral actions are unlike other actions in that they have both transitive and intransitive effects.’
‘But if you read it closely, you'll see I'm using the intransitive plural subjunctive tense.’
‘The object of knowledge is intransitive, the knowledge we have of it is transitive.’
‘The becoming is not a becoming something; it remains active and intransitive.’
‘Further, she suggests that ‘whereas poetic language is now more or less accepted as autonomous and intransitive, fiction and narrative still suggest a transitive and referential use of words’.’
Origin
Early 17th century from late Latin intransitivus ‘not passing over’, from in- ‘not’ + transitivus (see transitive).
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