transitiivsust

Transitiivsust, or transitivity, is a linguistic property of verbs that describes how many participants the verb requires and of what kind. It concerns the relationship between a verb and its arguments, especially the presence and type of a direct object.

A transitive verb requires a direct object to complete its meaning, as in She wrote a letter. An intransitive verb does not take a direct object, as in The sun rises. Some verbs can be both transitive and intransitive, depending on context: The door opened (intransitive) versus She opened the door (transitive).

A ditransitive verb takes two objects, typically a recipient and a theme: She gave him a book.

Transitiivsust is closely related to valency, the capacity of a verb to have a certain number and type of arguments. It also interacts with voice and causativity; languages vary in how they encode transitivity, using morphology, case marking, prepositions, or word order.

Understanding transitiivsust aids in parsing sentences, language teaching, and natural language processing, and helps explain cross-linguistic patterns in verb behavior.