It is closely related to valency, which considers other arguments in addition to transitive objects.
Many languages, including English, have ditransitive verbs that denote two objects, and some verbs may be ambitransitive in a manner that is either transitive (e.g., "I read the book" or "We won the game") or intransitive (e.g., "I read until bedtime" or "We won") depending on the given context.
It is possible to identify an intransitive verb in English, for example, by attempting to supply it with an appropriate direct object: By contrast, an intransitive verb coupled with a direct object will result in an ungrammatical utterance: Conversely (at least in a traditional analysis), using a transitive verb in English without a direct object will result in an incomplete sentence:
Often there is a semantic difference between the intransitive and transitive forms of a verb: the water is boiling versus I boiled the water; the grapes grew versus I grew the grapes.
Crosslinguistically, Hopper and Thompson (1980) have proposed to decompose the notion of transitivity into ten formal and semantic features (some binary, some scalar); the features argued to be associated with the degree of transitivity are summarized in the following well-known table: Næss (2007) has argued at length for the following two points: Types of participants discussed include: