Introducing English Grammar by Kersti Brjars;Kate Burridge; & Burridge Kate

Author:Kersti Brjars;Kate Burridge; & Burridge, Kate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published: 2025-12-05T12:18:16+00:00

Given the standard passive test (Meat cannot be eaten by me), the underlined phrase is a direct object, and hence, eat is a mono-transitive verb. However, 191.the object doesn’t really seem to be obligatory since the following sentence is grammatical:

(152) After all, I cannoteat.

Now what do we do? There seem to be two options. Either we say that an object can sometimes be optional, or we say that there are two verbs eat, one that is mono-transitive and one that is intransitive. Like any sensible linguist, we’ll go for the first option here. The verb eat means exactly the same thing in the two sentences, and in the example without an object present in the sentence, there is an understood object – you cannot eat without eating something. Eat is, then, a mono-transitive verb which can occur without its object. There are quite a few verbs like this in English, but it would seem that they all have to have quite a general meaning. A more specific ‘eat-verb’, like devour, doesn’t allow the object to be deleted, so that Oscar has devoured the fish is fine, but *Oscar has devoured is not.

A similar problem arises when the verb occurs in its passive form. Consider the following sentences:

(153) Cartoons have beenrevolutionized (by The Simpsons).

(154) Hip irreverence and clever satire have beendelivered (by The Simpsons) for more than 10 years now.

Here we have the same verbs that we started this section with. We said then that they were clearly mono-transitive. In (153) and (154), however, they lack an object, and the question is: do we want to say that they are now intransitive? The answer to this has to be ‘no’. Verbs that occur in passive sentences are still fundamentally transitive. The same point can be made for passive versions of di-transitive and complex transitive verbs too (these categories were introduced in Chapter 4, and we will return to them presently).

Sometimes when the object is left out, the verb may acquire a slightly different or more specific meaning. Consider the following pairs of sentences:

(155) a. Bender, the neurotic and corrupt robot,drinks.

b. Bender, the neurotic and corrupt robot,drinksonly mineral water.

(156) a. Fryhidesin a head museum.

b. Fryhidesthe money in a head museum.

(157) a. Hebrokehis artificial leg.

b. His artificial legbroke.

Under normal interpretation, Bender drinks would be taken to mean that he drinks more alcoholic beverages than is good for him, and hence the understood object is more specific in (155a) than with, say, eat. If the object of hide is left out, the understood object refers to the same thing as the 192.subject, so that (156a) means Fry hides himself. In the intransitive version of the sentence containing break in (157b), the subject corresponds to the object of the mono-transitive one in (157a). Still, the involvement of the artificial leg in both sentences in (157) is the same; the leg ends up broken in both sentences, and one can assume that something must have broken it. Using terminology to which we will return in Section 9.

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