Ambitransitive verb

An ambitransitive verb is a verb that is both intransitive and transitive. This verb may or may not require a direct object. English has many ambitransitive verbs. Examples include read, break, and understand (e.g., "I read the book", saying what was read, or just "I read all afternoon"). Ambitransitive verbs are common in some languages, and much less so in other languages, where valency tends to be fixed, and there are explicit valency-changing operations (such as passive voice, antipassive voice, applicatives, causatives, etc.). Generally speaking, there are two types of ambitransitive verbs, distinguished by the alignment of the semantic roles of their arguments with their syntactic roles. Agentive (S = A) ambitransitives are those where the single argument of the intransitive (S) is agentive and it corresponds to the agent (A) of the transitive. In Mary (S) is knitting, and Mary (A) is knitting a scarf (O), the person doing the knitting in both sentences is Mary. Likely candidates for this type of ambitransitive include those where an action can be described in general terms or with respect to a specific patient. English examples include eat, follow, help, knit, read, try, watch, win, know, and many others. These transitive versions have been called unergative verbs, but this term is not fully accepted since it is used for many other senses. Labile verb Patientive (S = O) ambitransitives are those where the single argument of the intransitive (S) corresponds to the object (O) of the transitive. For example, in the sentence John (S) tripped and John (A) tripped Mary (O), John is doing the falling in the first sentence. Likely candidates for this type of ambitransitive are verbs that affect an agent spontaneously, or those that can be engineered by an agent. English has bend, break, burn, burst, change, cool, enter, extend, fall, frighten, grow, hurry, melt, move, open, spill, stretch, trip, turn, twist, and many other verbs. Such verbs are also called labile verbs (or "ergative verbs").

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Transitivity (grammar)

In linguistics, transitivity is a property of verbs that relates to whether a verb can take objects and how many such objects a verb can take. It is closely related to valency, which considers other verb arguments in addition to direct objects. The obligatory noun phrases and prepositional phrases determine how many arguments a predicate has. Obligatory elements are considered arguments while optional ones are never counted in the list of arguments.

Unaccusative verb

In linguistics, an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose grammatical subject is not a semantic agent. In other words, the subject does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action expressed by the verb. An unaccusative verb's subject is semantically similar to the direct object of a transitive verb or to the subject of a verb in the passive voice. Examples in English are "the tree fell"; "the window broke".

Labile verb

In general linguistics, a labile verb (or ergative verb) is a verb that undergoes causative alternation; it can be used both transitively and intransitively, with the requirement that the direct object of its transitive use corresponds to the subject of its intransitive use, as in "I ring the bell" and "The bell rings." Labile verbs are a prominent feature of English, but they also occur in many other languages. The terminology in general linguistics is not stable yet. Labile verbs can also be called "S=O-ambitransitive" (following R.

Verb concepts from affordances

In this paper, we investigate how the interactions of a robot with its environment can be used to create concepts that are typically represented by verbs in language. Towards this end, we utilize the notion of affordances to argue that verbs typically refe ...

John Benjamins Publishing Company2014