Intransitive uses of transitive verbs

If you love grammar (and you must do, if you are reading this), you’ll probably already know about Oliver Kamm’s Pedant column in the Times newspaper in which he discusses points of English usage. His perspective is always refreshingly and sensibly descriptive, and averse to unmotivated prescriptivism. The same is true for his delightful book Accidence Will Happen.

In a recent column Kamm discusses the verb warn in the sentence below, published in his newspaper:

Crashing out of the European Union without a deal would generate an abundance of red tape, raise food and drug prices and cause lengthy delays at the border, businesses have warned.

Kamm cites his nemesis Simon Heffer, who argues in his book Strictly English that the verb warn cannot be used intransitively:

We often read in newspapers that somebody has warned that something will happen. This is ungrammatical. The verb warn is transitive: it requires an object. Somebody has to be warned.

Could Heffer be right, if only just this once? After all, we cannot say:

*She warned.

The verb warn requires a specification of who is being warned (optionally) and of the contents of the warning. For example:

She warned (us) that the shop would close very soon.

You can find hundreds of examples online where the target of the warning (the indirect object) has been left out. However, in the example above we cannot leave out the clause that is introduced by that which functions as direct object.

Because objects usually appear after the verb that selects them it may seem as though the verb warn is indeed intransitive in the Times sentence because nothing follows the verb.

However, transitive verbs are not always directly followed by their object. Consider this example:

Tea, I like, but not coffee.

In this sentence the verb like has a direct object, but it is not positioned in its usual place. Instead, it is placed at the beginning of the sentence. Grammarians call this process topicalisation. They would not say that like is intransitive here.

Consider also:

“I will not let you eat all the cake,” he said.

This would be an unremarkable structure in a novel. Here too the verb say is transitive. Its object (the clause I will not let you eat all the cake) has merely been preposed.

Now, something similar is happening in the sentence from the Times. I would argue that the object of the verb warn is the clause Crashing out of the European Union without a deal would generate an abundance of red tape, raise food and drug prices and cause lengthy delays at the border.

This becomes clear when we reorder the words:

Businesses have warned that crashing out of the European Union without a deal would generate an abundance of red tape, raise food and drug prices and cause lengthy delays at the border.

Here the clause introduced by the subordinating conjunction that comes immediately after the verb and is its object. This means that in both versions of the sentence warn is in fact transitive.

Kamm also cites an example of ‘intransitive warn‘ from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590):

And chearefull Chaunticlere with his note shrill/ Had warned once, that Phoebus fiery carre/ In hast was climbing up the Easterne hill . . .

However, in this case too, warn does have an object, namely the clause that Phoebus fiery carre/ In hast was climbing up the Easterne hill.

What about examples like this:

Anne: What were you doing on Sunday afternoon?

Kamal: I was reading.

Surely, this would be an example of intransitive read? Well, possibly, but we would then have to say that the dictionary should list read under two headings, namely read₁ (transitive) and read₂ (intransitive), which would suggest that they have different meanings. Alternatively — and I would prefer this option — we can say that in such cases there is an implicit object, because Kamal must have been reading something.

Is it correct to speak of the ‘passive tense’?

Nigel Dudley, who writes a blog about “how people in power, whether politicians or business leaders, deceive us by subtle – and not so subtle – distortions of language” has been getting a lot of flack for a passage in a post about Michael Gove’s instructions to his civil servants. Dudley writes:

In particular I noted one instruction which was hardly mentioned in the media coverage. Half way through the memo, Gove tells his bureaucrats to “use the active voice and the present tense as much as possible.”

Gove is highlighting a practice that the public sector – including for example the police, local government and health authorities – and big business are fond of using, particularly when they want to deceive us.

Those of you who read my blog will see the countless examples of this. Organisations use the passive tense in their statements, particularly when they have been criticised and want to dodge responsibility.

What’s the problem?

Well, Dudley is speaking in his post of ‘the passive tense’. As his critics have pointed out, this is incorrect. The reason is that the passive is not a tense, but part of the grammatical system of voice, which allows speakers to talk about a situation in different ways, depending on how the various participants are shown to be involved. An example:

• Mark cooked the dinner last night.
• The dinner was cooked last night by Mark.

The first sentence is in the active voice, in which the subject Mark has the role of agent (sometimes called do-er) who ‘acts upon’ the object (the dinner), which in turn has the role of undergoer (sometimes called patient).

The second sentence uses the passive voice, in which the roles are reversed: now the subject is the patient and the agent is expressed in a by-phrase. Active and passive sentences present the same situation in a different way.

This is probably all quite familiar, but it is important to distinguish voice from tense.

The notion of tense belongs to a different system of grammar. It is used to refer to the way in which the grammar of a language ‘encodes’ or expresses how a particular situation is located in time. The latter is a real-world notion which you can think of as the minutes, hours, months and years going by. So, for example, to talk about a situation in the past, we can use a past tense, as in both example sentences above. To talk about the present we can use a present tense, as in She always jogs to work in the morning. Most grammarians would say that English does not have a future tense, but that is a topic for another blog post.

Incidentally, Dudley is right to point out that the passive can be used to influence or manipulate people, and this is a very interesting topic to discuss in the classroom.

If you’re looking for some further background information on the passive, check out our Englicious Professional Development resources on the active and passive here. There are also exercises on the active and passive for your students at all Key Stages. Just type ‘active’ or ‘passive’ into the search box on Englicious to find them.