Using transitive and intransitive verbs
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Teaching implications | page 4 of 7 |
Choice of nouns in direct object position
When dealing with vocabulary, especially when presenting new verbs to students, it is
important to examine whether a verb is typically used transitively or intransitively. If
it used transitively, then you need to examine what nouns in direct object position
commonly occur or "go together" with the verb. (The technical term for this is collocate 
.) For example, consider
how the nouns which go together with achieve will differ from those which go
together with affect 
.
Such information can be obtained from examining the examples in a good dictionary such
as Sinclair, J. (ed) (1987) Cobuild English Language Dictionary, Harper
Collins, and from brainstorming. Another source of collocates (ie the words that go
together, such as Peking + duck, or Beijing + government) is a
corpus of different texts, made available from a concordancer 
.
Introduction
Choice of nouns in direct object position
