Japanese/Grammar/Transitivity

Many Japanese verbs belong to pairs of transitive and intransitive verbs. In Japanese these are known as 他動詞 (other move verb) and 自動詞 (self move verb). Formally, the difference between these is that a transitive verb can take on a direct object, whereas an intransitive verb (normally) cannot. There are a few pairs of distinct verbs in English that correlate to this: "raise"/"rise", "fell"/"fall" and "lay"/"lie".

Transitive verbs can be thought of as causative, requiring an agent to perform an action. Intransitive verbs move on their own and can be thought of as just existing.

This is best explained by example. Contrast the following pairs of sentences:

The general patterns for transitive and intransitive sentences is: The topics of intransitive verbs are usually inanimate.

Some pairings are listed in the following table:

The rule of thumb is that intransitive verbs usually take nouns with the particles 「が」(ga) or 「は」(wa) that act as subjects, whereas transitive verbs take object nouns marked with 「を」(o). Transitive verbs can also take a ga-subject or wa-subject, although it may be omitted. Note that some intransitive verbs can take an o-object that indicates a location. For example, 出る ("to leave") can be used with a direct object that is a location from which the subject is to leave from. See the table below for more examples: