Quick question about English transitive verbs w/o objects

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Das Baron
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Quick question about English transitive verbs w/o objects

Post by Das Baron »

Is there a name or technical term for the way English treats transitive verbs like "to feed", whereby they usually take an object ("The bird feeds its young"), but when it takes no object it's understood as having an unstated reflexive object ("The bird feeds"; i.e. "The bird feeds itself")?
AKA Benjaburns

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linguoboy
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Re: Quick question about English transitive verbs w/o object

Post by linguoboy »

Das Baron wrote:Is there a name or technical term for the way English treats transitive verbs like "to feed", whereby they usually take an object ("The bird feeds its young"), but when it takes no object it's understood as having an unstated reflexive object ("The bird feeds"; i.e. "The bird feeds itself")?
"ambitransitive"

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KathTheDragon
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Re: Quick question about English transitive verbs w/o object

Post by KathTheDragon »

More specifically, ergative verb.

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Re: Quick question about English transitive verbs w/o object

Post by Yng »

Not quite sure this works as ergative. When a bird 'feeds', it doesn't follow that it is 'being fed' - it could be eating food it found itself. When a glass breaks, it is broken.

I would say 'feed' transitive and 'feed' intransitive are actually different senses without a transparent connection like 'break' (trans) and 'break' (intrans). Perhaps you could interpret it as having an unstated reflexive object, but that's not how I intuitively interpret it and I can't think off the top of my head of any other examples.
كان يا ما كان / يا صمت العشية / قمري هاجر في الصبح بعيدا / في العيون العسلية

tà yi póbo tsùtsùr ciivà dè!

short texts in Cuhbi

Risha Cuhbi grammar

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Curlyjimsam
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Re: Quick question about English transitive verbs w/o object

Post by Curlyjimsam »

Beth Levin in her book English verb classes and alternations calls this the "understood reflexive object alternation". This PDF has a good summary of the various alternations Levin discusses: there are other meanings which can arises when an object is omitted too, depending on the verb in question - so The bird eats does not mean "the bird eats itself" but "the bird eats something unspecified" (unspecified object alternation).

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