Strictly transitive verbs. Do they exist?

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 4:50 am

Which are the strictly transitive verbs in English?

These have been suggested as some of them:

attain, attribute, cause, comport, delineate, depict, eclipse, impute, induce, portray, predecease, resemble, squelch, subsume, supercede, utter

Could those ever sound good if appearing without an object - or with the object as implicit?

How about abandon as a candidate for strict transitivity?

?"Where necessary, we must not merely revise, we must abandon."

"Discard"?

?*The company eventually decided to discard.

Andrew Patterson · Post by **Andrew Patterson** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 2:33 pm

I'm sure you know this but no verb can be completely transitive. They all become intransitive in the passive.

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 9:22 pm

"When writing this book I attributed whenever I could" OK?

"The sun eclipsed spectacularly a few weeks ago" Dodgy

"Olivier eclipsed in every scene" Not bad

"I shan't utter again" Why not?

"We squelched home disconsolately" squelch squelch squelch

"Doctors induce because they don't like babies to appear at weekends" ?

"I'm discarding" when playing cards! In fact this is in my dictionary as the intransitive use of "discard".

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Wed Oct 26, 2005 3:20 am

Andrew Patterson wrote:I'm sure you know this but no verb can be completely transitive. They all become intransitive in the passive.

I don't mean in constructions where the object is required to be eliminated, like passives (The food wasn't all eaten) or relative clauses (the things that they eat); I mean in construction types that allow the object to be present. If the verb is eat, for example, can the object just be left implicit?

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Wed Oct 26, 2005 3:25 am

JuanTwoThree wrote:"When writing this book I attributed whenever I could" OK?

"The sun eclipsed spectacularly a few weeks ago" Dodgy

"Olivier eclipsed in every scene" Not bad

"I shan't utter again" Why not?

"We squelched home disconsolately" squelch squelch squelch

"Doctors induce because they don't like babies to appear at weekends" ?

"I'm discarding" when playing cards! In fact this is in my dictionary as the intransitive use of "discard".

All good examples. Thanks. Some say it is hard to find even a list of eight verbs that would be strictly transitive in the context of allowing object omission - or an implicit object.

How about "await" here?

From T.H. White's "Once and Future King":

"There is nothing," said the monarch, "except the power which you pretend to seek: power to grind and power to digest, power to seek and power to find, power to await and power to claim, all power and pitilessness springing from the nape of the neck."

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Wed Oct 26, 2005 3:45 am

And these?

"Predecease" with implicit object: "Where the husband predeceases, neither widow nor children can claim a right in any part of the heirship moveables" (Erskine, Inst. Law Scot., 1765, via OED).

"Induce" with implicit object: "I'm really hoping I go before they have to induce because I've heard so many bad things about induction and how much more painful it is."