1967: Transitivity in Verb Pairs May 4, 2020

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People talk about irregular verbs usually with regards to tense, but this isn't the whole story by any means. English is not known for its inflectional morphology, i.e English words don’t change much; we add –s for 3rd person singular and –ed for past tense, but that’s about it for verbs. However, in the case of verb paradigms like with rise–raise, the difference is not tense at all, but of transitivity. What this means basically is that 'raise' can take a direct object such as 'dumbbell' in "I will raise this dumbbell over my head" but this is not possible with 'rise', which is considered intransitive, meaning someone cannot be said to rise something. Other examples include lay–lie and sit–set.
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