Transitivity

Transitivity 

a lexical-syntactic category of verbs denoting action upon an object.

In a sentence with a transitive verb, the subject is the subject of the action and a noun in the accusative or genitive case is the object of that same action, such as in stroit’ dom,”to build a house,” and zhdat’ poezda,”to wait for a train.” Transitivity plays an important role in the formation of the nominative construction. The same verb, depending on its lexical meaning, may be transitive or intransitive (that is, not governing the accusative case in an object without a preposition and acting on an indirect object), as in Russian pet’,”to sing,” and pisat’, “to write,” or English “to fly,” and “to run.”

The category of transitivity-intransitivity in Russian and other European languages has no morphological expression but may be associated with the word-formative structure of a verb. A distinction is made between direct transitivity, expressed by actual transitive verbs, and indirect transitivity, expressed by intransitive verbs (zabotit’sia o rebenke, “to look after a child,” or zavidovat’ soperniku,”to be envious of a rival”). There is no universally accepted opinion as to the nature of transitivity-intransitivity.

T. V. VENTSEL’