ABSTRACT
16.0. It is customary to divide verbs into transitive and intransitive. But in English at any rate, it is impossible to make a sharp distinction between two classes, and we should rather speak of a transitive and an intransitive use of verbs, for many verbs which are generally transitive, i. e. take an object (or two objects), are very often used without any object, and other verbs, which are as a rule intransitive, may at times be connected with an object. Sometimes the distinction is made in such a way that, for instance, change is said to be intransitive in "the weather changes", but to be used absolutely in "you must change at Wigan"; correspondingly with smoke in "the chimney smokes" and "Thanks, I don't smoke"—an object being understood in the latter, but not in the former case. This distinction, however, has no great significance, and it is not necessary to multiply grammatical terms.
