ambitransitivos

Ambitransitives, or ambitransitive verbs, are verbs that can appear in both transitive and intransitive constructions without any change in form. In the transitive use, the verb takes a direct object; in the intransitive use, it does not. The meaning often involves a change of state or event affecting the subject or environment, and the same verb lexeme is used in both readings, sometimes with slight semantic shift (for example, break vs break something).

Common English examples include open, break, and eat. Open: The door opened (intransitive) and He opened the door (transitive); break: The glass broke (intransitive) and She broke the glass (transitive). Eat: I eat (intransitive) and I eat an apple (transitive). In many verbs, the intransitive reading is metaphorically the subject undergoes the action.

Ambitransitives interact with linguistic notions of voice and causation. Some languages use a middle voice or anticausative form to express the intransitive use, while others treat both readings as simply different valencies of the same verb. Cross-linguistically, ambitransitivity affects how the argument structure is stored lexically and realized syntactically.

Diagnostic criteria include robustness of the intransitive reading, availability of a passivized transitive counterpart (The bottle was opened) and compatibility with object promotion, as well as possible reflexive or middle constructions.

In summary, ambitransitives are a flexible class of verbs whose transitivity can be varied with little or no morphological change, reflecting underlying relations between causation, change of state, and argument structure.