Action Verbs: Transitive or Intransitive?

I have the thrilling job of teaching college freshmen English grammar and composition, and though they don’t know why I do this in the beginning (and, admittedly, I think they sometimes still don’t care to know this by the end) I always start out by talking about verbs in the first week of the semester. For good reason, of course.

To me, it makes terribly good sense to do this, since you can’t really construct a sentence without incorporating action into it. Without verbs, your thoughts would be incomplete.

For example,

The Great Bambino in 1935.

This is not a sentence. It’s a fragment. You’ve got your noun, Bambino (I was in a nostalgic mood when writing this—and The Sandlot was playing in my mind); you’ve got your prepositional phrase in 1935, which does little else than give you a better picture of which phrase of the Great Bambino’s life we’re talking about.

But the sentence (or rather, the group of words) itself—it says nothing. So, let’s add something to that same thought.

The Great Bambino retired in 1935.

Now we know the point of the sentence. The verb completes the picture.

Verbs are necessary, and if you took any kind of grammar course in elementary school, you probably remember your teacher explaining that these verbs constitute the “action words.” Words like,

Play. Cook. Talk. Build. Smile.

They give your subjects impetus, momentum, direction—whatever you want to call it! Now in English, we do have a our “traditional” verbs, like the ones I just listed above, but don’t forget that the English language is an ever-evolving vortex of ancient Indo-European inflections and rules that English prescriptivists have grandfathered in generation after generation like precious family heirlooms. Tide half a millennia of morphological piety against the raging current of the linguistic anarchists of the twenty-first century, and war is on. There are rules concerning every part of speech, including verbs—rules constituting what verbs are, what they do, and how they can be used. And these are the kinds of rules grammar lovers, haters, and everyone in between love to argue about.

But in the end, someone has to “give,” because we can’t communicate without language.

It’s like that old purist claim that you should never turning a noun into a verb, like in this sentence:

We partied like it was 1989.

The word party is a noun, obviously. We take our kids to birthday parties. We tell the hostess at a fancy restaurant that we are a party of nine.

But can we also party?

That’s what’s up for debate. My father, to whom I owe most of my interest in the English language, would say, “Absolutely not, Sweetheart,” to me, before returning to his Honeymooner’s episode (the one in which Norton sleepwalks is one of my personal favorites!).

But others might tolerate, or even encourage, the evolution that every new language trend tries to instigate. Regardless of where you stand, some things (in my humble opinion) should stay the same, so that we can maintain some order in this sufficiently turbulent world—and that’s the purpose and requirement of the verb.

What are action verbs?

When I teach my students about verbs, I divide them into three main groups for them—linking, action, and helping. This isn’t groundbreaking for those of us who’ve taken on English grammar before. But for a lot of my newly graduated freshmen, sometimes this is brand new information.

For the sake of this post, I’m going to focus on action verbs today.

These kinds of verbs, unsurprisingly, show action. These action words can be as simple as the ones in these sentences:

Mark runs away.

The goat eats the grass.

Or—as I like to encourage my creative writing students—they can be a little more exciting, like in these sentences:

Mark hustles through the crowd.

The goat gnaws the grass.

“But aren’t all verbs ‘action words’?” you may be wondering—and the answer to that would actually be no. There are other kinds of verbs (which we’ll go over in another post) that don’t really show action much at all. (For example, linking verbs show a state of being more so than they show action—John is here.)

Helpful Categories

At this point in my lesson, I usually tell my students that when we’re looking at action verbs, it’s helpful to understand that these action verbs can also be further divided into more categories that help us know how to use them better. Action verbs can be either categorized as transitive or intransitive. While I don’t think these terms are very enlightening, rest assured that the concepts behind them are pretty easy to grasp.

Transitive verbs are action verbs that have “receivers” in the sentence they are used in. Intransitive verbs do not have receivers.

For example, in the sentence Todd baked a pie, the verb baked is transitive, because it has a receiver of its action—pie. The question being asked is, what is being baked? The answer to that, of course, is pie. The existence of pie makes baked a transitive verb, because there is something receiving the action of being baked.

Let’s take that same verb baked and make it intransitive. If we instead said, Todd baked in the kitchen, is there a receiver of the action? Do we know what is being baked? The answer to both questions is no, we don’t. We now know where the baking is happening, but we do not know what is being baked.

Below are a few more examples of transitive verbs:

The robber dropped his gun. (Dropped what? Dropped gun)

The toddler tossed the spoon down. (Tossed what? Tossed spoon)

The cat scratched the dog. (Scratched what? Scratched dog)

In all these instances, each action requires something to complete the action the writer or speaker is attempting to portray. If you just said the robber dropped and called it a day, you likely mean something entirely different than what is meant in the original sentence.

That being said, it’s vital to understand that action verbs aren’t only ever going to belong to one group or the other. As I mentioned earlier with the verb bake, an action verb that is used transitively may also be used intransitively—most of the time.  See how I can change the above sentences entirely while still using the same subjects and verbs:

The robber dropped to the ground lifelessly.

The toddler tossed in bed.

The cat scratched violently at the door.

In all these sentences, the action verbs are intransitive. What did the robber drop? We do not know. Did the toddler toss anything? Nope. What did the cat scratch? Well, we know it’s the door but the word door is not functioning in this sentence as a complement of the verb, but as part of the prepositional phrase. Thus, scratched is still intransitive here.

It should be mentioned, however, that some action verbs do tend to lend themselves to only being intransitive. For example, the verbs lied and died are usually intransitive. See here:

Joshua died in 1999.

The little boy lied to his teacher.

My best guess for why this is is that the only receivers that can typically come after these action verbs are too obvious to mention. Think about it. What can you die? Well, you can die a death. But it seems silly to say Joshua died his death in 1999. There is, of course, the emphasizing statement that we sometimes make about death that goes something like this: He died an agonizing death, in which, then, the verb is actually transitive.

The same goes for lie. What can you lie? Well, you can lie a lie. See what I mean? It’s most likely going to remain intransitive. Perhaps you can think of more verbs that are usually only intransitive.

Don’t Be Confused

During this same lesson, I repeatedly tell my students to ignore phrases and clauses that threaten to distract them from the task at hand: distinguishing between transitive and intransitive verbs. Ignore prepositional phrases, especially. For example,

In the middle of the classroom, Marsha stood with her hands in her pockets.

There are four prepositional phrases in that sentence. Ignore them all. The verb is stood. Is there a what receiving the action? Nope. The action is plainly stating that Marsha stood.

Don’t be confused by modifiers, either—like adjectives and adverbs. Like in,

During the movie, Donna laughed uncontrollably.

We don’t know what was laughed. We know how she laughed—uncontrollably.

One last note on confusing verbs: every once in a while, a be verb (which is typically considered linking or helping/auxiliary), may serve as an intransitive verb instead. For example,

Isaiah is in the trenches.

Lenore was at the beach.

Because the purpose of linking verbs is to link one thing to another, these be verbs above cannot be considered linking. Isaiah does not = trenches. Lenore does not = at the beach. It doesn’t make sense to equate those words, like it would if you were to say Isaiah is my student, which which Isaiah = student, or in Lenore is a good girl, in which Lenore = girl.

Thus, if nothing is being linked, then the verb must be an action verb instead. And since there is no receiver of that action, is and was are thus both intransitive.  

For more practice, download this FREE worksheet that goes over transitive and intransitive verbs.