WHEN we were children and just beginning to learn English grammar, many of us were taken aback by the strange failure of some verbs to work in certain sentence constructions. For instance, perhaps ...

When a sentence uses a transitive verb to describe an action, it’s necessary for the subject to take a direct object and to act on it: “The woman spurned her suitor last week.” ...

The past week witnessed the frequent occurrence of the words ‘resign’ and its derivative ‘resignation’ in the print, electronic and social media, thanks to LK Advani who stunned the BJP with his ...

Nama, a Papuan language spoken in southern New Guinea, indexes the person and number of the A argument of a transitive verb with a suffix, and the P argument with a prefix. For a large subset of ...

Different verbs take different types of complements and assign them to various positions. Two that we will consider here are ergative and unaccusative verbs. The basic one each assign a single ...

He's not her usual type, but she fell for him after dating for a couple of months. He fell for her on the first date. to cheat on (somebody): to secretly have a romantic or sexual relationship with ...

Listen to Prof Roly Sussex talk about how some verbs are actually transitive, and why. ABC Education brings you high-quality educational content to use at home and in the classroom. All our resources ...