I’m still trying to find out how it works exactly, every time I read something I have to reconsider my understanding.
Do you say that 「食べる。」 is transitive but has some invisible direct object?
Currently I prefer to think that 他動詞 means that there must be a direct object, and you will notice because the sentence will sound highly incomplete otherwise. Therefore the use of「食べる。」 is intransitive here because it sounds complete enough to be a sentence.
You said it before I think, transitive/intransitive is determined on a case-by-case basis on how the verb is used. I’m just thinking that learning for example “食べる is transitive” doesn’t help you to re-construct the way it is used, so you are better off learning example uses instead of relying on that categorization [because it is either ill-defined or not a bijective relation].
I’d argue that most of that is pretty intuitive and doesn’t require much formal knowledge of transitivity. Boiled down, intransitive verbs create the statement, “Subject does Verb,” and transitive verbs create the statement, “Subject does Verb to Object.” You can figure out how that all works just by understanding how the particles work.
I talked to a friend who majored in linguistics in undergrad about this. She studied English and Chinese grammar, so she warned to take her statements with a grain of salt, but given that Japanese makes the same distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs as English (and Chinese) she felt comfortable saying that under certain paradigms (functional grammar which focuses on pragmatic usage) transitivity can be considered a continuous spectrum rather than a binary categorization (traditional grammar which focuses on theoretical usage/definitions).
The problem is they are two meanings and one is common in English and one is common in Japanese.
In Japanese a verb is transitive if it can take a direct object with を.
If it appears without a を-object, there is an “invisible” (null) object and the English translation will usually contain “it” or “something” or the like.
A verb is intransitive if it cannot take an object with を.
(It can still take an object with に, etc., though.)
In English a usage of a verb is transitive if it appears with a direct object.
It is, in most cases, not an innate property of the verb because most English verbs allow both transitive and intransitive usage.
You can apply this definition to Japanese and say that 「食べた。」 is intransitive usage; I just don’t think it’s useful to introduce this concept to Japanese.
It feels more natural to say there is an invisible object.
Some verbs have both transitive and intransitive meanings (kind of like having two different verbs that are homonyms) and some verbs have ambiguous transitivity in the sense that they are used inconsistently by different speakers. That is the “spectrum” of transitivity that @reichter was referring to.
I could argue there is a clear meaning difference here but you don’t seem to care. Whatever. Transitive, shmanisitve, believe what you want. I give up.
It’s not uncommon for different meanings to have different grammatical properties.
I don’t understand why you mock me when I’m just trying to explain how the concept of transitivity works in Japanese grammar.
There is literally no point to a hostile linguistics argument because it’s easy to just shit all over your opponent’s argument; there are no absolutes, it’s always just assigned properties as part of some framework that is used to understand language as a whole.
It’s not fucking mathematical axioms where you can use a single example to disprove everything.
And by the way if you think transitivity is useless, FINE.
I DONT GIVE A SHIT.
I just tried to explain something and instead I get mockery.
Fucking hell.
Sadly, discussions of transitive / intransitive verb pairs always end in someone losing their cool. Because the less important the outcome of a discussion, the more some people seem to have invested in it. And there’s literally nothing less important to discuss than whether 食べる or 笑う is transitive or intransitive.
@acm2010, I’d still like to see the picture from that book though. It sounds interesting.
At the risk of inflaming the argument again, I think 終わる is a better example of how a verb can be either transitive or intransitive without being so confusing.
I finished a project. (transitive)
Summer finished. (existing, I guess you could say, but that’s not an object) (intransitive)
Sorry about yesterday. I was more irritated by his tone than anything else. He could have phrased his arguments more constructively and I would have replied more favourably, but he didn’t and I lost it.
I can see why concepts such as null objects are questionable to some people. There is a lot of “this phenomenon happens a lot in this language so it probably also happens here” which isn’t something you can get from looking at a single sentence and applying some straightforward rules to it.
And ultimately there is always different ways to break things down.
And no way is ever really perfect. There’s always some dumb word that defies all rules.
Sometimes you can try and look at the exception and try to make sense of it.
笑う (“to laugh”) is clearly a different meaning than を笑う (“to laugh at”) so I don’t think it’s absurd to assign one [-transitive] and the other [+transitive].
終わる seems like a better example of English-style double transitivity in Japanese. Curious what happened there.
But it doesn’t really matter since he didn’t really seem interested in breaking things down at all.
Fine, if grammar study isn’t useful or interesting to him, that’s it.
Different people have different approaches to learning languages.
