Directly What

Last week’s post, The Transitive View, brought this question from a student: “You say that the verb walked in the sentence I walked along the shore is intransitive because it has no direct object. But the subject did something at the shore, so why can’t we say that the noun shore is the direct object of walked, and therefore the verb is transitive?” This is a very common question on the topic of transitive verbs, and it arises from a subtle misrepresentation of the grammar. Let’s begin with a brief review of the notion of transitivity.

Most modern languages, I think it’s fair to say, are set up on the assumption that the world is a multiplicity. We are aware and awake in the world, but as we begin to fragment that experience with nouns and verbs, our awareness turns to consciousness, and the power of our mind sees things both as being what they are and as acting in some way, that is to say, taking on a role in a given circumstance and attempting to change that circumstance by doing something. Nouns name things and verbs say what those things are or do. The sentence I am a student identifies what the subject is, or exists as; but in the sentence I walked along the shore, the sentence is concerned not with saying what the subject is, but rather what it is doing.

If a verb acts directly on something (and the key to understanding this lies in the word directly), as the  verb read does in the example I read an interesting essay on space travel last week, that verb is termed transitive because its action is thought to go across from the subject directly into something other than the subject, the noun essay (or more completely, interesting essay). That noun is called the direct object of the verb, and all transitive verbs, by definition, have such a direct object. If, contrariwise, the action of a verb does not go directly across into something other than the subject, as in I walked along the shore, the verb is termed an intransitive verb. Intransitive verbs do not have a direct object.

But—to return to our opening question—why is the noun shore not a direct object? To answer that, we must remember that the art of language attempts, like all arts, to re-present (I use the hyphen deliberately) an experience we live, either actually or imaginatively. The reality behind the linguistic representation of I walked along the shore was that there wfas the subject I, there was a shore, and there was the act of walking—three things I experienced as one unified moment of reality as I lived it. But when I wish to re-present that singular moment in the art of language, with all its parts of speech and all the syntactical relationships among them, I am compelled to transpose the truth of the moment into a linguistic expression of it, and with that I am duty bound to follow the craft, the way, of language. The truth of what happened is one thing; its linguistic representation is quite another.

And that linguistic rendering requires me to cast my lived experience into the elements of language: words, phrases, and clauses. When I reflected on that moment and decided to communicate with subject and verb that I walked, I next decided to tell where I walked—not directly what I walked, but where. That made it necessary, then, to choose the appropriate preposition, along, and since all prepositions work with their own objects, I placed the noun shore with it to construct a prepositional phrase. That phrase in its entirety, then, stands as an adverb (called an adverbial phrase), and so we have the answer to our original question: the noun shore cannot be the direct object of walked—first because it does not say what I directly walked (as it would, for example, in the sentence I walked my dog), but where; and second because it functions already as part of a prepositional phrase. We can see the structure of the sentence in two parts: what the subject did and where it happened. The action did not have an object, but it did have a location.

That, at least, is the way our common language sees it, chopping up our every move with words and phrases.

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