First off, I do understand the basics. Transitive is working with a direct object, and intransitive is not.
Many of the examples make sense.
The sun rises – **intransitive**
Helios raises the sun – **transitive**
Obviously in the latter, Helios himself is directly doing the action, where as in the former its simply occurring without someone doing it.
Where I am getting confused is in this idea that if it needs to be done directly by a person only to be transitive?
So take this sentence **風でドアが開いた The door opened from the wind.**
I understand I wrote it here with が, but that is simply because I know that’s how its written, NOT because I really get why it can’t be with を instead.
In this I would say that not only did something directly open the door, but we know what the factor was that did so, so why is it not transitive? The only thing I can reason is that it must be a person who did the action to be transitive….but that doesn’t make sense with the definition as all it says is that it can’t be done by a “direct object”
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/transitive-intransitive-verbs/
In this article is says the following
> I opened the door.
**Pronoun verb direct object.**
>The door opened.
**Noun phrase verb.**
>The verb “open,” by itself, is not inherently more transitive than it is intransitive or vice versa. It can be used in both situations:
>1. A door being opened by someone or something
>2. A door opening by itself (like an automatic door)
Within their description it says the door being opened by “something” qualifies as being transitive, by the definition right above, however yet in the sentence I made about the wind being the cause of the door opening, it is meant to be intransitive in Japanese? I don’t really understand this.
To be clear, I am simply trying to understand, not prove any point or say I am right, I want to know why I am wrong, not trying to say any of the information is wrong, quite contrary I want to know where I am wrong because I have not been able to wrap my head around this.
7 comments
In your example, 風で merely indicates context.
The idea is “With the wind blowing, the door opened [itself]”, so here, the subject is the door, and the wind is an element of context.
The key difference between transitive and intransitive is if the subject is the one who “recieves” the action.
を is used when the subject and the “reciever” of the action are diffent.
田中さんがドアを開けた uses the transitive version of the verb, because it means “Tanaka-san opened the door”
The usual example for this in English is “The cat ate the mouse”/”The mouse was eaten by the cat”
In japanese it would look something like this
猫がネズミを食った／ネズミが猫に食われた
Notice how the が switches position. In both sentences, the one “recieving” the action is the mouse, but in the transitive version the subject is the cat, while in the intransitive version the subject is the mouse, while the cat is optional information on how the mouse got eaten, indicated by に
I hope this helps !
Think about this sentence: “the sun rises by Helios’ power”
The verb itself is still intransitive, because grammatically, you’re explaining the reason for something, but there’s no direct object.
Additionally, you said this:
>”open,” by itself, is not inherently more transitive than it is intransitive
But in Japanese, there are two words for open. One is transitive (開ける あける) and the other is intransitive (開く あく). That’s why grammatically, we have to phrase it like “the door opened from the wind” when using 開く (intransitive).
Thinking of whether a verb is transitive or intransitive in English won’t really help, because Japanese has far more transative-intransitive pairs than English does (and we don’t even really care about the ones we do have, like lay-lie). So, yes, “open” in English can be used as either, but that’s largely irrelevant. In Japanese it’s 開く and 開ける, and they each have their uses.
Inanimate objects/concepts/phenomena can be the subject of a sentence with a transitive verb (in certain situations), so the question is why is that particular sentence written like that? And the answer is the utterly unhelpful “because that’s how people normally do it”. There are a lot of things in language that boil down to “people just do it that way”, even if there’s no grammatical rule stopping them from doing it a different way. It’s related to the concept of collocation. Nothing grammatical stopping you from doing it, but a native speaker will look at it and think…”huh, that’s weird, no one ever writes it like that”. There are probably some intricate reasons when this is acceptable and when it’s not, but I don’t know them, and they might be so complicated they’re unhelpful.
In general, Japanese does like to lean more towards intransitive than English does, it just has more of them anyway.
Some examples of inanimate objects with transitive verbs ([from this study on page 211 which is actually referencing another study in 2001](https://www.cajle.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Yamada_CAJLE2014_Proceedings_210-219.pdf)):
津波が海浜の部落を襲った。
過度の野心が彼の寿命を縮めた。
白い布が机を覆っている。
この提案は問題を含んでいる。
川が町の中心を流れている。
I just found it interesting. I’m not sure it actually adds to your understanding…
It’s the same way in English, even with words that can obviously never be transitive, like *die* or *arrive*: *He died due to a stroke.* The latter part merely explains that he died of a stroke, but the stroke is obviously not the direct object of the verb here, so *die* is still intransitive.
See, when you say 風で, you are assigning a cause or reason: “Because of the wind”. ドアが開く(the door opens) is grammatically correct because there is no doer of the action upon the door; the door itself performed the action, and the wind is the cause. You could have worded it as 風がドアを開ける (The wind opened the door), which is grammatically correct but unnatural.
Let’s go with an obvious intransitive verb, “to die” (死ぬ).
事故(じこ)で姉(あね)が死(し)にました。 = My sister died from/because of/due to an accident.
Now, clearly the accident isn’t the doer of “to die” upon my sister, but merely the reason for **her body shutting down all of its functions by itself**.
When you want to make the above sentence transitive, you’ll need to use a different verb, say 殺(ころ)す or “to kill”.
ピカチュは姉を殺しました。 = Pikachu killed my sister.
Now clearly Pikachu is the doer of “to kill” upon my sister. If we were to make this intransitive, we can say 姉が殺されました (My sister was killed), but the passive form is a lesson for another day.
I like to think of it the following way:
を−verbs = transitive (I know that wo is the direct object, so I need to put the known as a direct object)
and
が-verbs=intransitive (particle GA shows the subject)
The transitive/intransitive verb system in Japanese has no connection to the English one. I think you are much better thinking like this.
Japanese doesn’t really like inanimate things or concepts to be acting directly on something else, so sentences with inanimate subjects are rephrased in translation. Compare the following sentences, which are equivalent:
* The letter from her deceased husband **made** the widow cry. [TRANSITIVE]
* 亡き夫からの手紙を読んで、未亡人が泣いてしまった。(Reading the letter from her deceased husband, the widow **cried**.) [INTRANSITIVE]
To write this as 亡き夫からの手紙が未亡人を泣かしてしまった would be exceedingly strange in Japanese, as though the letter had a will of its own. So while you *could* use a transitive verb here, you generally wouldn’t.