and transitive .
Intransitive verbs
An intransitive verb can occur alone in the predicate of a sentence,
because it requires no other sentence element to complete its meaning:
Amy laughed.
The baby cried.
The temperature dropped.
The sky darkened.
The ship disappeared.
Each of these sentences contains just a subject and a verb, so their pattern is:
Sentence pattern 1
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
S V
Amy laughed.
Linking verbs
Unlike other verbs (such as destroy, sing, laugh, eat, break), the verb be
does not denote any kind of ‘action’. Instead, it links the subject to
another element following the verb:
Paul is 12.
Here, we would not say that Paul performs any ‘action’ in ‘being 12’.
The verb simply links the two elements Paul and 12, and for this reason,we call it a linking verb.
Be is by far the most common linking verb, though there are several others:
The house appeared empty.
She looks uncomfortable.
The animals became restless.
The crowd went wild.
The element following a linking verb is called the subject complement . Therefore the pattern in these sentences is:
Sentence pattern 2
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
S V SC
Paul is 12.
Transitive verbs:
A transitive verb is a verb which cannot stand alone in the predicate
of a sentence. Instead, it requires another sentence element to complete
its meaning. Consider, for example, the verb destroy. This verb needs an
element following it – one cannot simply destroy, one has to destroy something. Compare:
The soldiers destroyed.
The soldiers destroyed the village.
Destroy, therefore, is a transitive verb. Further examples of transitive verbs include:
The generator produces electricity.
Jim bought a new house.
She really enjoyed her party.
Christopher Wren designed St Paul’s Cathedral.
In these examples, the element that completes the meaning of the transitive
verb (the village, electricity, a new house, etc.), is called the direct
object .These sentences therefore display the pattern:
Sentence pattern 3
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
S V DO
The soldiers destroyed the village.
Many verbs have both intransitive and transitive uses, sometimes
with different meanings. Compare the following pairs:
Intransitive: The boys grew (S+V)
Transitive: The boys grew mushrooms (S+V+DO)
Intransitive: The old man shook (S+V)
Transitive: The old man shook his fist (S+V+DO)
Intransitive: Simon sings (S+V)
Transitive: Simon sings ballads (S+V+DO)
