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.
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.

Agentive and patientive

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

Agentive ambitransitives are those where the single argument of the intransitive is agentive and it corresponds to the agent of the transitive. In Mary is knitting, and Mary is knitting a scarf, 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.

Patientive

Patientive ambitransitives are those where the single argument of the intransitive corresponds to the object of the transitive. For example, in the sentence John tripped and John tripped Mary , 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, walk, and many other verbs. Such verbs are also called labile verbs.
Confusingly, verbs of this type have also been called unaccusative verbs, middle voice, anticausative verbs in the literature, but these terms usually have other meanings in the literature. In a useful discussion of the terminology, Dixon flat out rejects the use of the word ergative to describe such verbs, which was originated by Halladay's 1967 paper and propagated by Lyons' 1968 textbook, because the "ergativity" is contained entirely in the lexical unit and has no influence on a language's overall morphological or syntactic ergativity.
For some of these verbs, native speakers' intuition tells us these words are primarily transitive and secondarily intransitive. For other words, the opposite is true. This latter group can be said to undergo change into a causative verb.

Pseudo-reflexivity

Alternating ambitransitives are not uncommon in English. In the Romance languages, such verbs are rarely found, since the same semantic concept is covered by pseudo-reflexive verbs. These verbs behave like ambitransitives, but the intransitive form requires a clitic pronoun that usually serves also for reflexive constructions. See for example, in Spanish :
In the example, the verbs romper, hundir and derretir are all transitive; they become intransitive by using the pseudo-reflexive clitic, and the direct object becomes the intransitive subject.
Ambiguity may arise between these and true reflexive forms, especially when the intransitive subject is animate. Me estoy hundiendo usually means "I'm sinking", but it could also mean "I'm sinking myself", "I'm getting myself sunk".