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Tuesday, February 9. 2016

Transitive and Intransitive Verbs


Good grammar is the sign of either a good primary education or a heavy reader. With enough reading, the reader will intuitively get transitive vs intransitive right without even knowing those terms. (The use of the subjunctive works similarly.)


I remember the difference by thinking that a transitive verb transfers the verb's force to something. Intransitives just exist. "I hit the ball" vs. "I exist."


Lousy grammar bugs me and it bugs Ann Althouse: "The worst thing about Rubio's repeated line isn't that he repeated it, but that he thinks 'dispel' is an intransitive verb..."


Actually, I think Rubio meant to say "dispense," and misspoke.


Posted by The Barrister in The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 15:20 | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)

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Good grammar is like good manners.
#1 Bird Dog on 2016-02-09 18:37 (Reply)
The very error outlined in that Althouse post shows up 5 times in this new article re the Super Bowl:

http://sportsworld.nbcsports.com/super-bowl-joe-posnanski-michael-schur/
#2 Gene on 2016-02-09 22:05 (Reply)
He may not have meant to say "dispense", but should have. Or, someone in his team should have mentioned it. Althouse implying that he's dumb is a little harsh. He isn't dumb simply because he doesn't have the vocabulary of FDR or Bill Buckley, Jr. Gimme a break.

I think it's funny that they pick on Rubio for poor grammar and vocabulary, considering some of his fellow candidates.
#3 Jack Walter on 2016-02-09 23:40 (Reply)
I'm too lazy to look up the citation, but if I remember correctly vocabulary size correlates extremely strongly with IQ.

In other words, if someone repeatedly uses words incorrectly (showing that they don't even know they don't know) they are an idiot.
#3.1 JM01 on 2016-02-10 10:32 (Reply)
"Dispense with" is a phrasal verb as a unit, and as a unit is transitive.
#4 rhhardin (Link) on 2016-02-10 07:17 (Reply)
Most grammar doesn't work the way that sentence diagramming suggests, in fact. If you want 2000 interesting pages on it, _A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language_Quirk Greenbaum Leech and Svartvik is worth a summer.

It's a descriptive grammar, or the science of what sounds right and what doesn't sound right.

The number of discoverable rules is astounding. Particularity exists in everything.

My favorite useful rules are that subjects of nonfinite verbs (verbs not carrying tense) are in the objective case, as in Latin; and "for" serves to mark the subject of a to-infinitive, far from its sentence diagramming account as a preposition.

Descriptive grammar tries to come up with what is actually happening.
#5 rhhardin (Link) on 2016-02-10 07:23 (Reply)
You get particularity in rules -- and ease in spotting foreigners speaking English -- because learning language is learning to disassemble cliches and reassemble them (my theory), not learning words and then larger units.

You start with the larger units.
#6 rhhardin (Link) on 2016-02-10 07:28 (Reply)

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