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fluffyhamster
Joined: 13 Mar 2005
Posts: 3292
Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again
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 Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2012 10:11 am Post subject: Transitive or intransitive? |
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"She looked at the trees, their branches bending to meet the grass."
The first half (a finite clause) of the above sentence is clearly a T, but what about the second half? |
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johnslat
Joined: 21 Jan 2003
Posts: 13859
Location: Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2012 12:10 pm Post subject: |
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Dear fluffyhamster,
Wouldn't "the grass" be the object of the infinitive "to meet"?
Regards,
John |
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fluffyhamster
Joined: 13 Mar 2005
Posts: 3292
Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2012 1:09 pm Post subject: |
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| Yes, one would've thought so, eh! The book in which I noticed that particular example (Collins Easy Learning English Verbs) has however marked it as being an intransitive usage of the verb 'bend'. |
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johnslat
Joined: 21 Jan 2003
Posts: 13859
Location: Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2012 2:54 pm Post subject: |
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Dear fluffyhamster,
The verb???? bend??? Yikes - and here I would've thought "bending" was a present participle adjective modifying the noun "branches".
Hmm, I gotta get me that there book  .
Regards,
John |
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Sashadroogie
Joined: 17 Apr 2007
Posts: 11061
Location: Moskva, The Workers' Paradise
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2012 4:12 pm Post subject: |
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It is intransitive, isn't it? Or maybe one of these fancy ergative verbs.
Anyways, here's how I break down the sentence:
...the branches (which were) bending (themselves) (in order to) meet the grass. |
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LongShiKong
Joined: 28 May 2007
Posts: 1082
Location: China
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2012 4:56 pm Post subject: |
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Dear fluffy et al:
Aren't both both? Aren't they're transitive AND intransitive. The word for that is ambitransitive. And isn't 'bend' also an ergative verb.
English is rocket science!  |
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johnslat
Joined: 21 Jan 2003
Posts: 13859
Location: Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2012 5:11 pm Post subject: |
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Dear LongShiKong,
But fortunately, not brain surgery - since it's a no-brainer .
Regards,
John |
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Sashadroogie
Joined: 17 Apr 2007
Posts: 11061
Location: Moskva, The Workers' Paradise
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2012 6:08 pm Post subject: |
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| Is echo an ambi one too? |
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Glenski
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
Posts: 12844
Location: Hokkaido, JAPAN
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2012 10:20 pm Post subject: |
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| The way the 3 verbs are used above, look and bend are intransitive, while meet is transitive. Many verbs possess both properties, depending on how they are used. |
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johnslat
Joined: 21 Jan 2003
Posts: 13859
Location: Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2012 10:49 pm Post subject: |
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So, "bending" is NOT a present participle adjective modifying the noun "branches"?
The person writing this post is surprised 
Regards,
John |
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Glenski
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
Posts: 12844
Location: Hokkaido, JAPAN
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| Posted: Fri Jun 08, 2012 2:05 am Post subject: |
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We're both right, john.
It's a present participle adjective (form of a verb) modifying the noun "branches" and taken from an intransitive verb. |
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fluffyhamster
Joined: 13 Mar 2005
Posts: 3292
Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again
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| Posted: Fri Jun 08, 2012 2:21 am Post subject: |
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Here's the full entry, for what it's now worth (the asterisk denotes an irregular verb):
| Quote: |
bend * [bend]
bends......3rd person present
bending...present participle
bent.........past tense & past participle
1 INTRANSITIVE to move the top part of your body down and forward: I bent and kissed her cheek.
2 TRANSITIVE AND INTRANSITIVE to change the position of something so that it is no longer straight, or to be changed in this way.
T: Remember to bend your legs when you do this exercise.
I: She looked at the trees, their branches bending to meet the grass.
3 INTRANSITIVE to change direction to form a curve: The road bends slightly to the right. |
| johnslat wrote: |
| The verb???? bend??? Yikes - and here I would've thought "bending" was a present participle adjective modifying the noun "branches". |
I wouldn't analyze it as an adjective or adjectival here ('their bending branches meeting the grass', maybe!). It just looks SVO-y to me; specifically, it appears to be an 'absolute clause', which is: "A non-finite or verbless clause containing its own subject, separated from the rest of the sentence by a comma, or by dashes, and not introduced by a subordinator. A verb, if used, can be an -ing or an -en form. The fight to board the train - the women crushed against the doors, the children desperately clutching their mothers - repeated itself at the next station; The place empty once more, I settled down for the night. Except for a few set phrases (weather permitting, present company excepted) absolute clauses tend to be formal and written. If the subject is a pronoun it must be in subject, not object, case (e.g. I refusing to go, Nicholas went alone) so absolute clauses are sometimes called nominative absolutes." (Chalker & Weiner's Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar. And just to be sure and FWIW, at the entry 'participle clause' it says that "A participle clause that contains its own subject is a type of ABSOLUTE clause").
| johnslat wrote: |
| The person writing this post is surprised |
I'm not sure if I'm reading you correctly, but if you're drawing an analogy with 'postpositive adjectives' (such as 'the teacher responsible rather than concerned' LOL), there's the object 'this post' in er, your post there for a start (not that removing the object will change the meaning much).
| LongShiKong wrote: |
| Aren't both both? Aren't they're transitive AND intransitive. The word for that is ambitransitive. And isn't 'bend' also an ergative verb. |
Sure, and the above entry in full should make it clear that the book is trying to show at least some of this flexibility. (For terms/labelling like ergative though, one needs to get dictionaries proper like the COBUILD ones, also from Collins)). Not that the main issue, the I(ntransitive) labelling for the example in question, seems any less incorrect!
| Glenski wrote: |
| The way the 3 verbs are used above, look and bend are intransitive, while meet is transitive. |
Although I appreciate that there is a preposition coming between the verb and the object in 'She looked at the trees', making it strictly speaking an intransitive, I think a more holistic analysis might be more beneficial (see the following quote), and Crystal in the 'transitivity' entry of his A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (5th edition) mentions that 'Some grammarians also talk about (in)transitive PREPOSITIONS. For example, with is a transitive preposition, as it must always be accompanied by a NOUN phrase COMPLEMENT (object)', all of which hopefully helps explain my rather loose phrasing at the start of my first post in this thread ('The first half (a finite clause) of the above sentence is clearly a T'. What I was trying to say was "is clearly more of a T than the second half is possibly not an I!").
| Quote: |
| the Comprehensive Grammar (cf. p. 1156) explicitly mentions two complementary analyses of verb-preposition combinations, so that a sentence like 'She looked after her son' can be analysed either as 'S-V-A' ('She - looked - after her son') or as 'S-V-O' ('She - looked after - her son'). |
( http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-1853.html )
And I'm not sure that it makes much analytical sense to separate 'bending' from 'to meet'.
Last edited by fluffyhamster on Sat Jun 16, 2012 6:27 am; edited 10 times in total |
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johntpartee
Joined: 02 Mar 2010
Posts: 3258
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| Posted: Fri Jun 08, 2012 2:33 am Post subject: |
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Is bending also a gerund? When it's not used in the present continuous? Which reminds me, I saw a definition of gerund in a book (forget which one, but it wasn't an ESL book) that said "gerund" is a verb or noun with the "ing" suffix. I can't think of any instances when a noun would be a gerund.
Hope I'm not waylaying the OP's question, but to me it looks like one of these "trying to explain why English is the way it is". |
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johnslat
Joined: 21 Jan 2003
Posts: 13859
Location: Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
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| Posted: Fri Jun 08, 2012 12:08 pm Post subject: |
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Dear johntpartee,
Sure - depending on the context. My understanding is that the second part of the verb (the present participle) can be used in a number of ways:
1. as a verb - all the active continuous/progressive tenses (the helping verb "being" being used for all the passive continuous/progressive tenses)
1. The wind is bending the branches.
2. as an adjective
2. in a "reduced adjective clause" (The branches (that are) bending in the wind are beautiful) or in the regular adjectival position (the bending branches almost touch the ground.)
3 as a gerund
3. Bending before exercise is a good practice.
4. even (occasionally) as an adverb
4. He spends all day bending paper clips.
I've always believed that context is "everything" and that what part of speech a word is depends upon the job it's doing in a sentence.
But perhaps my interpretations are faulty 
Dear fliffyhamster,
I've always thought of "look at" (and the other "look + particle" verbs) as phrasals.
Regards,
John |
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fluffyhamster
Joined: 13 Mar 2005
Posts: 3292
Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again
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| Posted: Fri Jun 08, 2012 3:51 pm Post subject: |
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In addition to what Johnslat's written, you may find the following from the COBUILD Grammar quite useful, Johntpartee (and I've quoted it before in another "gerund-inspired" bit of discussion):
| Quote: |
1.78 Referring to activities and processes: '-ing' nouns
You often want to refer to an action, activity, or process in a general way. When you do, you can use a noun which has the same form as the present participle of a verb.
These nouns are called different things in different grammars: gerunds, verbal nouns, or -ing forms. In this grammar we call them '-ing' nouns.
It is sometimes difficult to distinguish an '-ing' noun from a present participle, and it is usually not necessary to do so. However, there are times when it is clearly a noun, for example when it is the subject of a verb, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition.
Singing's one of my interests - I belong to a choir.
They were at school when the emphasis was on teaching rather than learning.
He told how hard the days of walking had been, how his muscles had ached.
The coming of the transistor could not have been foreseen.
Some people have never actually done any computing. |
This particular instance of 'bending' is clearly more verby than nouny, so there is no need to invoke the dreaded gerund term - 'participle' and 'participle/participial clause or phrase' (or indeed just wishy-washy "verbal") will do. And in case you're wondering, there's not even the need IMHO for (Johnslat and Glenski's) adding 'adjective' to the mix. Sure, participles can be adjectives (i.e. participial adjectives' - I'll type up the Chalker & Weiner entry if you like!), but that 'bending' there isn't functioning as one as far as I can make out.
Last edited by fluffyhamster on Fri Jun 08, 2012 4:04 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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