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| Transitivity and valency |
|---|
| Transitivity |
| Intransitive verb Transitive verb Ambitransitive verb |
| Valency |
| Impersonal (Avalent) Intransitive verb (Monovalent) Monotransitive (Divalent) Ditransitive verb (Trivalent) Tritransitive verb (Quadrivalent) |
| Valence increasing |
| Causative Applicative Benefactive Dative shift |
| Valence decreasing |
| Passive Antipassive Impersonal passive |
| Reflexives and reciprocals |
| Reflexive pronoun Reflexive verb Reciprocal construction Reciprocal pronoun |
 Linguistics portal |
Ingrammar, aditransitive (orbitransitive)verb is atransitive verb whose contextual use corresponds to asubject and twoobjects which refer to atheme and a recipient. According to certain linguistics considerations, these objects may be calleddirect andindirect, orprimary andsecondary. This is in contrast tomonotransitive verbs, whose contextual use corresponds to only one object.
In languages which markgrammatical case, it is common to differentiate the objects of a ditransitive verb using, for example, theaccusative case for the direct object, and thedative case for the indirect object (but this morphological alignment is not unique; see below). In languages without morphological case (such as English for the most part) the objects are distinguished by word order or context.
English has a number of generally ditransitive verbs, such asgive,grant, andtell and manytransitive verbs that can take an additional argument (commonly a beneficiary or target of the action), such aspass,read,bake, etc.:
Alternatively, English grammar allows for these sentences to be written with apreposition (to orfor): (See alsoDative shift)
The latter form is grammatically correct in every case, but in some dialects the former (without a preposition) is considered ungrammatical, or at least unnatural-sounding, when the direct object is a pronoun (as inHe gave me it orHe gave Fred it).
Sometimes one of the forms is perceived as wrong for idiosyncratic reasons (idioms tend to be fixed in form) or the verb simply dictates one of the patterns and excludes the other:
In certain dialects of English, many verbs not normally treated as ditransitive are allowed to take a second object that shows a beneficiary, generally of an action performed for oneself.
This construction could also be an extension of a reflexive construction.
In addition, certain ditransitive verbs can also act as monotransitive verbs:[1]
Many ditransitive verbs have apassive voice form which can take a direct object. Contrast the active and two forms of the passive:
Active:
Passive:
Not all languages have a passive voice, and some that do have one (e.g.Polish) do not allow the indirect object of a ditransitive verb to be promoted to subject by passivization, as English does. In others like Dutch a passivization is possible but requires a different auxiliary: "krijgen" instead of "worden".
E.g.schenken means "to donate, to give":
Another category of ditransitive verb is the attributive ditransitive verb in which the two objects are semantically an entity and a quality, a source and a result, etc. These verbs attribute one object to the other. In English,make,name,appoint,consider,turn into and others are examples:
The first object is adirect object. The second object is anobject complement.[2][3]
Attributive ditransitive verbs are also referred to asresultative verbs.[4]
Themorphosyntactic alignment between arguments of monotransitive and ditransitive verbs is explained below. If the three arguments of a typical ditransitive verb are labeled D (for Donor; the subject of a verb like "to give" in English), T (for Theme; normally the direct object of ditransitive verb in English) and R (for Recipient, normally the indirect object in English), these can be aligned with the Agent and Patient of monotransitive verbs and the Subject of intransitive verbs in several ways, which are not predicted by whether the language isnominative–accusative,ergative–absolutive, oractive–stative. Donor is always or nearly always in the samecase as Agent, but different languages equate the other arguments in different ways:[citation needed]