An ambitransitive verb is a verb that is both intransitive and transitive. This verb may or may not require a direct object. English has many ambitransitive verbs. Examples include read, break, and understand (e.g., "I read the book", saying what was read, or just "I read all afternoon").

Ambitransitive verbs are common in some languages, and much less so in other languages, where valency tends to be fixed, and there are explicit valency-changing operations (such as passive voice, antipassive voice, applicatives, causatives, etc.).

Agentive and patientive

Generally speaking, there are two types of ambitransitive verbs, distinguished by the alignment of the semantic roles of their arguments with their syntactic roles. These transitive versions have been called unergative verbs, but this term is not fully accepted since it is used for many other senses. and propagated by Lyons' 1968 textbook, because the "ergativity" is contained entirely in the lexical unit and has no influence on a language's overall morphological or syntactic ergativity. hundir and derretir are all transitive; they become intransitive by using the pseudo-reflexive clitic, and the direct object becomes the intransitive subject.

Ambiguity may arise between these and true reflexive forms, especially when the intransitive subject is animate (and therefore a possible agent). Me estoy hundiendo usually means "I'm sinking" (patientive first person), but it could also mean "I'm sinking myself", "I'm getting myself sunk" (agentive).

See also

  • Diathesis alternation
  • Labile verb
  • Valency (linguistics)
  • Transitivity (grammar)

References

  • Changing valency: Case studies in transitivity (edited by R. M. W. Dixon & A. Y. Aikhenvald, Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University, Melbourne)

fr:Transitivité (grammaire)#Verbes labiles