Yeah, you’ve lost me here. With in a pair, like あげる/あがる for instance… which have you decided is the “plain form” and which have you decided is… whatever the “not plain form” is… would be. And what does that mean?
Yes, I realised my ‘suggestion’ doesn’t make sense. So I withdrew it. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I know some people do that on flash cards, i.e. put 上げる / 上がる on the same card.
I do agree that it’s helpful to study them as pairs, even though they are technically different verbs.
Transitive/intransitive forms were actually conjugated forms originally but they are distinct verbs in modern Japanese. See http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/message/jpnEUwEoW7XEUhMPq0e.html
In Japanese, if a transitive verb occurs without an object you can consider there to be a null-object.
Applying the English notion of “transitive usage” and “intransitive usage” to Japanese only leads to confusion, imho.
In Japanese, transitive and intransitive is a property of the verb, period.
No, state of being is indicated with ている or てある.
One thing that causes confusion is that there are two groups of transitive/intransitive meanings in English.
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Object is just missing, e.g. “to eat” or “to follow” do not fundamentally change in meaning if you add an object.
“I ate” “What did you eat?” “I ate a sandwich.” -
Object and Subject positions switch around. These are actually most verbs, which is a very confusing feature of English.
Consider “break”.
“The window broke.” ← the thing broken is in subject position
“I broke the window.” ← the thing broken is in object position
An exchange like
“The window broke.” “What did it break?”
would be silly.
English does not generally allow null objects, so we consider verbs like “to eat” or “to follow” to have ambiguous transitivity.
“I dropped” ← not valid because “to drop” is strictly transitive in English
=> have to say “I dropped it”
In Japanese we can have null-objects so it’s natural to say that a transitive verb is a verb that CAN take a を-object but NEED NOT take a を-object, since it could also be unstated.
However the meaning is ALWAYS as in (1).
There is never any of the crazy English subject-object switching happening with transitive verbs.
With intransitive verbs you CANNOT use を object.
Often, but not always, the thing in subject position is a “patient” (thing affected by something).
In those cases, it kind of looks like the phenomenon from (2) happening, that’s why we often translate both verbs from a pair with the same English word.
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Yes, the progressive tense indicates state, but intransitive verbs can also convey more or less a state of existence. For example, 分かました conveys a state of understanding without using the progressive. Similarly, both 毎日１０時間寝る and 毎日10時間寝ている are valid sentences which both convey a habitual action/state of existence. Conveying state of existence may not be a part of intransitive verbs’ lexical properties, but they regularly serve in that function.
Isn’t this just the passive voice? That’s different from the intransitive. I think the intransitive form of that sentence is, “The window is broken.” I’m not a linguist though and somebody should correct me if I’m off base.
Again, I’m not a linguist, but I’m going to need to see some sort of source on that. Anecdotally, English allows plenty of sentences with null subjects or null objects. I ate. I bake. I read. We may be using ‘null’ to mean different things. I’m using it to define the case where the DO of a typically-transitive verb is unspecified either explicitly or by context, so it is, for all practical purposes, a non-entity. However, I’ve also seen the term used to refer to items in a sentence that aren’t explicitly stated but have an implied existence due to context (e.g., Japanese null subject). Looking at the rest of your post, that does seem to be a point where we’re missing one another.
To clarify the rest of my position, I’m not trying to debate whether or not transitivity is part of a word’s lexical identity. Words definitely have linguistically-defined properties; however, I don’t think we should let these properties confine us. These properties are attempts to make sense of the very, very messy phenomenon known as language, and consequently don’t capture the full range of “irregular” usage of the average native speaker who don’t give a second thought (or a first thought for that matter) to a word’s lexical properties.
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“The window is broken” sounds like a state to me. I think window is a bad subject for examples, so here’s a different subject:
The car broke - intransitive
(Someone/Something) broke the car - transitive
The car was broken (by someone/something) - transitive passive
It’s probably debatable whether those words are both transitive and intransitive in English, or if they have a null object. I’m also not a linguist and have no idea which it is, or if it even matters. 
At the very least, I think we can say that English allows for the null object significantly less than in Japanese. While sentences in past progressive tense with unspecified objects sounds perfectly natural to me (e.g. “I was reading”), I can’t say the same for normal past tense. If someone just said “I read”, I’d immediately ask “You read what?”, because you can’t really leave out what you read and still make sense in English.
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That’s a good example, but I think it’s also alright for some verbs to convey states, right? For example 分かる indicates the state of something being understood, 曇る is the state of something being cloudy. Unless I’m thinking about these verbs in the wrong way?
Definitely agreed. You can think of examples where “I read” works – e.g., responding to a query about what you did today, and I can see arguments for either a transitive or intransitive interpretation – but as you say, none of us are linguists, and from the small amount of reading I’ve done, even linguists often find these things puzzling. For the most part, transitivity isn’t super important except in the case of picking one of a transitive/intransitive pair, and these don’t even form a plurality of Japanese verbs.
As you hinted at, at a certain point grammar is a matter of interpretation. However, from my point of view at least, you have those backwards. Sort of.
In “The window is broken,” broken is functioning as an adjective. But putting it in the past tense: “The window was broken by Mary,” is the passive voice in English.
On the other hand, “The window broke during the earthquake,” (just to give it some context) is a clear use of to break used as an intransitive verb. A formulation of the same idea using a transitive verb would be, “The earthquake broke the window.” I think that last sentence sounds a little unnatural in English and Japanese. (地震が窓を壊した。) But in English and Japanese, the intransitive usage sounds more natural (地震で窓が壊れた。)
With the caveat that my ability to determine what sounds natural in Japanese should be considered suspect.
[ETA: please replace 壊れる/壊す above with 割れる/割る with relation to windows. See my note below.]
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You’re right that it’s descriptive. Without making any claims about your example, which I think is a good one, there is a class of verbs, statative verbs, which describe state of being. They have a fun feature of largely being incompatible with ーている form. I can’t seem to find a comprehensive list of statative verbs, and I don’t know enough about the nuances to Japanese to say whether or not this allows for the informal use of typically non-statative verbs in statative functions in Japanese. What I can say is that I used statative a lot in the above, and now my head hurts 
But mostly I wanted to establish that at least some verbs can serve in a semi-descriptive function, which is an idea I’ve gotten a bit of push back on.
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I agree that many people think this is true, but if you look in a dicitonary, verbs like “to eat” will have multiple listings, some transitive and some intransiive.
In english the verb in the sentence: “I ate.” is considered an intransitive verb.
You can see this distinction by the following dialog:
A: Did you eat the last slice of pizza?
B: I ate. *
The intransitive verb is not a valid response to the transitive question. They are different verbs that are spelled the same (or the same verb with multiple incompatible usages).
In english grammar verb transitivity is defined as whether or not there is an explict direct object.
The confusion comes from the fact that we think of some verbs has having a innate “transitive” semantic meaning. (like to eat). But transitivity (as it is discussed in grammar texts) in english is a syntactic property.
I would suggest for anyone interested in this kind of stuff to check out Hasegawa’s “Japanese: A linguistic introduction”. It has an excellent discussion of transitivity (semantic and syntactic) as it applies to japanese usage.
I make this argument in my original example several posts up. In English at least, the transitivity is dependent on context and can get pretty wishy-washy. The companion dialogue to the one you wrote out is:
A: Did you eat before coming?
B: Yes, I ate.
English has a lot of these kinds of words. I think the major question we have is whether or not that same wishy-washiness might be applied to Japanese verbs. I think you raise a similar issue here:
We both agree that many English verbs don’t have innate transitive properties, but the question is how does this affect our interpretation of Japanese words that perform similar roles?
There are definitely cases where it doesn’t work (transitive/intransitive pairs), and definitely cases where you can (I think most -suru verbs can double?; there’s also a class of verbs that are explicitly defined as being able to be either). But there are some corner cases like 食べる which are lexically transitive, don’t have an intransitive counterpart, and you can easily come up with, at least on surface-level, intransitive usages for them.
It may be that a transitive verb is a transitive verb is a transitive verb, forever and for always, and in formal linguistics this is probably the case. However, you can also see the argument for saying that this transitive verb is serving an intransitive function in colloquial usage. I personally don’t know enough about how a native Japanese speaker would interpret these things in colloquial use to really say though.
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Interestingly this idea can be translated naturally into Japanese.
もう来る前に食べた？
うん、食べた。
And it seems that in both languages there’s no stated object because the object is irrelevant. So in English you might say it’s an intransitive usage in that it doesn’t explicitly transform or act on anything else. But I think Japanese wouldn’t say it’s 自動詞 because you aren’t eating yourself.
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What is the benefit of transitive/intransitive when you can just drop the direct object anyway and no one really knows what it means, anyway?
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I think it only matters for picking the correct part of a transitive/intransitive pair and answering things right on WK otherwise it’s not really practical knowledge afaik.
Edit: And I guess it’s kind of important for me because it’d be nice to definitively know whether or not my example on why Japanese transitivity is fluid and not worth worrying about actually works hehe. I have a linguist friend who tells me my intuition is right, but she does English and Chinese linguistics. They use the same definitions for transitive and intransitive, but there is possibility of error.
The focus is different. Transitive = someone did this. Intransitive = it is how it is.
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Yes, stative verbs are a subgroup of intransitive verbs, in Japanese. Habits are not states, though.
Whether or not there is a null object is defined by the grammar, but there is no one true grammar for a language.
You can certainly make a grammar of English that includes null objects but that seems a bit odd to me.
English speakers will often use “it” or “something” as an object.
“Have you seen the movie?” “Yes, I’ve seen it”
In English it’s more exceptional that you can leave out the object entirely (“Have you eaten?”) so it makes sense to me to consider those intransitive usages instead.
You can say that about everything grammar related.
Because you WILL sound wrong if you ignore transitive/intransitive in Japanese. It’s like saying “I fell the vase” rather than “I dropped the vase”.
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For the verbs where you have a clear pair it helps to know which one is transitive/intransitive because then you know when you have to use a direct object. As in have to use, otherwise you get a sentence that sounds very incomplete.
For verbs like 食べる it is not helpful because it only produces pages of linguistic hocus pocus that don’t make you much smarter after reading than before. The rules should help you to produce a correct sentence instead of linguistic self-satisfaction.
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I can confirm this I’ve spent way too much time today delving into this just to prove that it’s not significant distinction in the case of 食べる and similar verbs. I don’t feel very much smarter at all.
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But knowing that 食べる is transitive tells you you need to use を to add an object, as opposed to が or に.
(Add quotation marks on “object” if you feel strongly about が never marking objects)
Whereas an intransitive verb such as 分かる does not use を with (quasi-)objects.
e.g. 私は 日本語が わかる。
I can’t think of a verb that takes a single object with に right now but they exist as well.
(Similar to English verbs that require a preposition with the object, “to contribute to something” or “to approve of something”)