Writing week nine
Transitivity
Who did what to whom?
Who did what to whom?
Earlier in the course we learned that 28 Days Later (2002) is the best zombie movie ever. Watch the clip, and place the events from the film below in the correct order:
Some verbs in English are followed by an object, which means that the verb changes the state of the person or thing that comes after it. In sentences such as the boy kicked the ball, zombies killed everyone, and Dave broke the photocopier, the ball, everyone, and the photocopier have all changed somehow, and someone made the change happen. We call these types of verbs, that change the state of an object transitive verbs. because they don't make any sense without objects (e.g. sentences such as the boy kicked, zombies killed and Dave broke are meaningless).
Compare these to verbs that are intransitive, meaning that they don't take an object. In the sentences: the virus spread, everyone died and the photocopier broke the verbs just happen by themselves. Nobody caused them to happen.
Israeli forces shoot Palestinian boy
Yesterday afternoon, October 4, Israeli forces shot a Palestinian boy in Jenin. The boy was wounded in his side. Israeli forces prevented access to the boy’s family. He died at the Israeli military roadblock. Mohammad Zeid (16), who was studying with a friend, opened the window of the room where he was studying. Israeli forces, located 50 metres away, ordered him to shut the window. However, one Israeli soldier opened fire and wounded him in the left side. Sameer Zeid (40), who came to rescue the boy, carried him in his car, but Israeli forces stopped the vehicle and prevented the man from crossing and additionally prevented access to an ambulance to rescue the 16 year old boy. Finally, after a long negotiation, Israeli forces allowed an Israeli ambulance to evacuate Mohammad Zeid, who died at 14.30.
Palestinians killed, solider wounded
On Friday, Palestinians reported that Muhammad Zeid, 17, was hit by IDF gunfire in the village of Nizlate Zeid, west of Jenin, where security forces were enforcing a curfew. Zeid died at a nearby IDF roadblock shortly afterward. The Palestinians claimed that soldiers prevented Zeid from receiving medical treatment from Palestinian medics, saying that he died while being taken by an Israeli ambulance to hospital in Israel.
The IDF spokesman responded that security forces entered Nizlat Zeid to enforce a curfew and were confronted with groups of Palestinians who threw stones at them. The soldiers fired into the air to disperse the stone throwers and, when they failed to move, fired a second round of shots in which a Palestinian civilian was wounded.
So far we've looked at agency from a critical thinking point of view; sometimes we can infer the stance of an author on a particular topic by whether or not it's clear who did what to whom. However, in academic writing we may also avoid agency for conciseness, or because the agent (the person who did the action) is obvious.
Rewrite the sentences so that the phrase in bold is the subject. Do not include the agent.
materialise - wait - emerge - arrive - disappear
Last term in one of our listening classes we started to look at wordlists, and how they can help us find out more about the most common words in the language we are studying. We're going to return to the Sketch Engine, to look at the most common verbs in academic writing, and how they're used. We're going to look at the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, which is a collection of nearly 3,000 university essays.
Select verbs and hit go.
Choose a verb and find the dots.
Select one of the tools.