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The words listen, shout, etc. are intransitive verbs, but why are they used in passive sentences with preposition to, at, etc.?

e.g:

she was never listened to.
I don’t like to be shouted at.

When intransitive verbs are used with preposition, are they considered as transitive verbs?

tchrist
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Dinusha
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2 Answers2

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The mistake is believing that "intransitive" is an invariant property of verbs.

Transitivity is a property of clauses, not of verbs. Many verbs cannot be used alone in a transitive clause, and therefore transitivizing prepositions are used to make them transitive. These prepositions don't even have their usual meaning -- they're just crutches used to produce a transitive clause. Sense verbs are a good example.

  • Bill heard the sonata. (transitive)
  • Bill listened for an hour. (intransitive)
  • Bill listened to it for an hour. (transitive)
  • Mary saw the painting. (transitive)
  • Mary looked for an hour. (intransitive)
  • Mary looked at it for an hour. (transitive)

Clearly the preposition to in the third sentence does not mean what to normally means.
Likewise, the preposition at in the last sentence is not a normal use. Both are governed by the verb.

When a verb is transitivized by adding a preposition, the transitive verb is the V + P combination,
and it can be passivized like any transitive verb

  • They looked at/listened to/thought about/argued over/made much of it for decades. (active)
  • It was looked at/listened to/thought about/argued over/made much of for decades. (passive)
Dog Lover
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John Lawler
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    Very well put. – Gary's Student Aug 24 '14 at 16:07
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    Are you saying that the third sentence has a structure like Bill [listened to] [it] rather than Bill [listened] [to it] ? – Araucaria - Him Aug 24 '14 at 20:05
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    No. I'm not saying "rather than". I'm saying "in addition to". – John Lawler Aug 24 '14 at 20:19
  • @Araucaria The French cunningly have a single-word verb which maps across to 'listen to'. But I'm assuming John Lawler is referring to the different degrees of 'binding' [my term here] between simplex verb and prepositiony-thing. – Edwin Ashworth Aug 24 '14 at 22:24
  • Not my term. But it does have a metaphoric sense that describes it reasonably. This is a syntactic linkage, different from but not entirely dissimilar to the linkage between verb and particle in phrasal verbs like look up. Those follow different rules and are easily distinguished from prepositions because they can be shifted and can't occur with pronoun objects. She looked at the book/it vs She looked up the book/*it. – John Lawler Aug 24 '14 at 22:39
  • In both cases the verb and the particle/preposition/adverb chunk can form a constituent which overlaps another constituent; both arrangements are available to the speaker and listener to play with as they please. – John Lawler Aug 24 '14 at 22:40
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    This answer states "Transitivity is a property of clauses, not of verbs" and then (confusingly) ends by talking about transitivity as being a property of verbs: "When a verb is transitivized by adding a preposition, the transitive verb is the V + P combination, and it can be passivized like any transitive verb." – Arm the good guys in America Jan 21 '17 at 18:48
  • @Clare Transitivity seems a word in need of a common, agreed-upon definition here for these discussions. For various reasons I don't know that it would be good enough to say that it's simply any verb with one or more non-subject NP arguments. For one thing, that might let verbs like be, seem, become that take “predicate nominatives” as their arguments sneak in and break something important on us like passive inversion. But that seems closer to what John means when he says that adding a preposition to intransitive verbs lets them become transitive, since now they can accept an NP argument. – tchrist Jan 21 '17 at 21:01
  • @EdwinAshworth Which French verb were you referencing? Also, what is 'cunning' about it? –  Jun 06 '17 at 04:40
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    @Canada - Area 51 Proposal The French verb écouter is transitive, so écoute-moi! (= listen to me!) doesn't take a preposition. / I'm saying that this makes rather redundant the 'is P a real preposition here?' debate in this particular (French) case. I'm representing the development by the French of the single-word transitive verb (I don't actually know how or why it happened; there was probably no intention to simplify analysis involved) as a clever analysis-simplifying device. – Edwin Ashworth Jun 06 '17 at 10:33
  • @EdwinAshworth +1. Thanks for the elucidation! –  Jun 07 '17 at 02:21
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    Hi John, I hope you don't mind my edits. I thought adding some hrs made the intransitive-transitive groupings clearer. Feel free to rollback if you disagree. – Dog Lover Jul 22 '17 at 03:00
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A transitive verb is a verb which has a direct object. (e.g. I saw the car, I ate the food)

A prepositional phrase does not count as a direct object, so both transitive and intransitive verbs can have prepositional phrases.

Ashwin Ramaswami
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    That doesn't answer the question. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 24 '14 at 13:38
  • Transitive verbs take two arguments. The second argument can be a nominal phrase, or a preposition phrase or even a verb phrase. To say transitive verbs can only take nominal objects is nonsense. – curiousdannii Aug 24 '14 at 23:17
  • @curiousdannii If you agree J Lawler's post above is accurate then you agree that clauses and not verbs are in/transitive. A prepn itself is not a DO, and of course neither is a prepositional phrase. To the extent that some verbs tend to take DOs and others PCs and others other types of complements with different semantic roles then epicfaace is not wrong. Shout at someone for example has a verb which takes at as a complement, at takes a noun as complement. The noun, which could be considered object of at is NOT a complement of the verb shout. – Araucaria - Him Aug 24 '14 at 23:33
  • @curiousdannii What I meant was that transitive verbs are the only verbs that can have a direct object. Both transitive/intransitive verbs can still have phrases. – Ashwin Ramaswami Aug 25 '14 at 01:33
  • Both of you are either using these terms wrong or in ways I've never seen, but probably wrongly. There is a crucial difference between arguments and adjuncts. Transitive verbs take two arguments, which can be various types of phrases. And I might not agree with jlawler. Many verbs do have a strict number of arguments they can take, and though there are valence changing constructions they are marked. You can't transitivise sleep! – curiousdannii Aug 25 '14 at 03:25
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    You can't "sleep it off"? – G Tony Jacobs Aug 25 '14 at 03:36
  • @GTonyJacobs Hah, well done, though I'd say that's either a different word/phraseme or at the least a different sense. Just like sleep on it. Related, but distinct from sleep. – curiousdannii Aug 25 '14 at 06:51
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    ...or, indeed, sleep your way to the top, which actually involves very little sleeping. – G Tony Jacobs Aug 25 '14 at 13:22
  • How about "I've not slept a full nights sleep in over ten years". – Araucaria - Him Jan 23 '17 at 13:25