Dear Yong Peng

I have seen the web sources you have linked to, thank you. However,
after seeing them, I come to think that transitiveness (transitivity?)
itself of a Pali verb is different from that of English. I would use
some examples to explain my view.

A set of questions and answers that use transitive verbs are given
below, both in English and Pali, for the sake of comparison.

(Q) ---"Who killed the dog?" "ko sunakha.m ghaatesi?"
(A) ---"I killed it" (or) " I did" "aha.m ghaatesi.m" (Note that
the object is omitted)

The answer in Pali would literally mean "I killed . . .", which is not
proper English (Please correct me if I am wrong), yet quite natural in Pali.

What I want to point out is that:

1. In English, transitive verbs require *explicit* objects, without
which they won't be complete.
2. On the other hand, in Pali, being a transitive verb means only that
it HAS an object, which may be *expressed or omitted and deducible from
the context.*.

As for the root gam, as we have seen before, it has the destination of
movement as its object. And it will still be transitive whether that
object is explicit or not.

But you are right. It is not always transitive. For instance, in the
following sentence:
". . . idha gaccha, amutraagaccha . . ." (D-1-8)
Trs.: . . . Go to this place; come to that place . . .

In the above example, the destination of movement is used in locative.
(I think this must be the older language, for, such a usage is much more
common in Classical Sanskrit) Then there would be nothing imaginable
left to be an object for the verb "gaccha". In such sentences, the root
gam is intransitive.

with metta

Ven. Pandita

>Dear Ven. Pandita, Nina and friends,
>
>Bhante, I agree with the three conditions. However, I find the examples not comprehensive. This is because of the word 'go', which is not transitive in English. In fact, it is also not exactly transitive in Pali. Words like cook and cut are transitive. Words like go and fall are intransitive.
>
>There are some web resources here:
>http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/writcent/hypergrammar/trnsintr.htm
>l
>http://www.dailygrammar.com/116to120.shtml
>http://www.bartleby.com/68/24/6124.html
>
>metta,
>Yong Peng.
>