Monotransitive verb

In linguistics, a monotransitive verb is one that takes a single direct object, such as buy, bite, break, and eat.

Verbs are categorized in terms of transitivity (i.e. how many and which types of syntactic argument they may cooccur with), the basic distinction being between transitive verbs (taking one or more arguments) and intransitive verbs (taking zero arguments). The transitive category is further divided into subclasses.

The following examples show monotransitive verbs in sentences (the direct object is in boldface):

• Yesterday, I bought a cat.
• The cat bit me!
• He broke the toothpick.
• The chef ate his own watermelon soup.

Traditionally, transitivity patterns are assigned to the verb as lexical information, but recent research in Construction Grammar has shown that this is actually a wrong conception, since the same verb very often appears in different contexts of transitivity. Consider:

• The man bought his wife a ring. (ditransitive)
• Stop me before I buy again. (intransitive; so-called anti-passive construction)
• The cat bit him in the arm. (so-called complex transitive)
• Can you bite me a pice of banana? (ditransitive)
• The vase broke. (intransitive; so-called middle voice construction)
• Can you break me some toothpicks for my model castle? (ditransitive)
• She broke the toothpick into tiny pieces. (so-called complex transitive)
• Not now, I'm eating. (intransitive; so-called anti-passive construction)

Thus, in grammatical construction theory, monotransititivy is assigned to so-called argument structure constructions, which are schematic types of grammatical construction, rather than to the verb.

Transitivity is roughly synonymous with subcategorization.