Checking that a verb can take its noun
A sentence can agree in number and still say something nobody meant, because a verb has been given a subject that cannot perform it or an object it cannot take. Whether a verb can take its nouns turns on whether it is transitive in the sense used, what its arguments and adjuncts are, and whether its agent can really perform the action.
The noun-verb transaction
One medical editor holds that the noun-verb transaction is the most important concept in Standard English, and probably in all human language. By definition, every clause and every simple sentence contains some sort of noun-verb transaction. In the same editor's experience, the very worst writers are those who do not think clearly about how their nouns relate to their verbs: not those whose nouns disagree with their verbs in number, but those whose nouns have nothing whatsoever to do with their verbs, or whose verbs are incorrectly used in a transitive sense. A writer who wants to write good sentences, or an editor who wants to turn bad sentences into better ones, is strongly advised to review seventh-grade English, including the parts of speech and the basic principles of Standard English syntax, and sentence diagramming is a valuable tool for understanding noun-verb transactions. Diagramming a sentence shows its syntactical relationships easily.
Transitive and intransitive verbs
A direct object answers the question what? or whom?, and an indirect object answers such questions as to or for what? or to or for whom?. A transitive verb takes a direct object and an intransitive one does not; some verbs, such as eat, are ambitransitive and work either way — I eat and I eat pie. All verbs can have a subject, but only transitive verbs can take a direct object. Some verbs are never transitive, and when people try to use them as transitive verbs the result is ugly. The subjects were fasted for 10 hours is one: to fast is to abstain from food, or from food and liquid, and it is intransitive, so nothing and nobody was ever fasted. The sentence becomes the subjects fasted for 10 hours; for an animal or a baby, it should say that food and water were withheld for 10 hours; and it can also begin after a 10-hour fast. In medicine remit is an intransitive verb meaning to abate in force or intensity, so a disease can remit and patients cannot, unless what is meant is that they paid their bills, which is a completely different, transitive sense of the word; several of the depressed patients remitted becomes several patients' depression remitted. Looking up even common verbs in Merriam-Webster, as a habit, is strongly advised, to see whether each can be used in a transitive or intransitive sense and how it relates to various nouns. A good dictionary tells whether a verb can be used in a transitive sense, and one medical editor avoids giving a direct object to a verb that it lists as only intransitive.
Linking verbs, also called copulas or copulative verbs, are a special form of intransitive verb. They link the subject to a subjective complement, which can be another noun (a predicate nominative) or an adjective (a predicate adjective). A linking verb can link a noun to an adjective but not to an adverb, so one feels bad rather than badly, because to feel is a copulative verb.
Verbs that take more than one object
There are several special kinds of transitive verb: ditransitive, factitive and causative verbs. Verbs that can take an indirect object are sometimes called dative verbs, as in I sang to her. A ditransitive verb takes a direct and an indirect object: in she gave Fred $5, $5 is the direct object and Fred the indirect object. Some grammarians argue that a few tritransitive verbs take two objects and a that clause or prepositional phrase, as in I'll bet you $10 that he can't diagram this sentence. Tritransitive verbs are also described as taking a direct object and two indirect objects, such as to trade in I traded him my peanut butter sandwich for a Twinkie. A factitive verb seems to take two direct objects, or rather a direct object and an objective complement, as in they elected Kathy president. A causative verb is followed by an infinitive phrase that serves as a direct object, with the subject of the infinitive in the objective case (him, not he). Three causative verbs, have, make and let, are followed by a noun or pronoun and the base form of the verb, the infinitive without to.
Grammatical sentences that make no sense
Medical communications are supposed to make sense, so one of a medical editor's most important responsibilities is to find and fix nonsensical sentences. Some of the problems that make a sentence nonsensical are syntactical, arising from a flaw in its grammatical structure, and others are semantic, arising from the meanings of its words. Noam Chomsky's classic example in Syntactic Structures (1957) is grammatically correct and makes no sense: colorless green ideas sleep furiously has a noun phrase as subject and a verb phrase as predicate, and its noun and verb agree in number, yet ideas have no colour, nothing could be colourless and green at once, ideas cannot sleep, and nothing can sleep furiously. Sentences can be analysed for semantic problems by asking whether their noun-verb transactions make sense, and in particular by taking each verb in turn and considering how it relates to each of its arguments and adjuncts.
A verb's arguments and adjuncts
A verb's arguments are the nouns and noun phrases that stand in some relationship to it in a particular sentence: its subjects, direct objects and indirect objects. Its adjuncts are elements that are not structurally necessary, so the sentence would still be complete and grammatical without them, but that can provide useful information; they include adverbial prepositional phrases and adverbial clauses.
Linguists have terms for the semantic relationships between nouns and verbs, and they help in thinking about how a verb relates to the nouns and adverbial elements in a sentence. An agent is an entity that performs an action and a patient an entity that undergoes one. The agent of a verb is not necessarily the subject of the sentence, nor the patient always the direct object: I broke the window is active, with the agent as subject and the patient as direct object, while in the passive the window was broken [by me] the patient is the subject and the agent stands in a prepositional phrase or is omitted.
Some common types of semantic arguments and adjuncts, sorted by their syntactical roles, are these; the arguments are subjects, direct objects and indirect objects, and the adjuncts are adverbial phrases or adverbial clauses:
- Subjects. An agent deliberately performs an action (I spoke); a force or natural cause mindlessly performs one (the wind blew); an experiencer receives sensory or emotional input (they suffered).
- Direct objects. A patient undergoes an action and changes its state (I broke the window); a theme undergoes an action but is not changed (I gave him $20).
- Indirect objects. A recipient receives ownership (I gave him $20); a beneficiary is the entity for whose benefit the action was performed (I baked her a pie).
- Adjuncts. Time, when an action occurred (the operation was performed on Tuesday); location, where it occurred (the procedure was performed in the examination room); source or origin, where it originated (the foreign body was removed from his ear); direction or goal, where it is directed (she was taken to the hospital); instrument, something used to perform it (the incision was made with a scalpel); manner, how it was carried out (the bill was sent to me in error); purpose, why someone chose to do it (she called to remind me about the meeting); cause, why it occurred (the ice in the freezer melted because the power went out).
The boundaries between these terms are sometimes hazy; it may be hard to decide, for example, whether something is a patient or a theme.
Which subjects can perform a verb
Careful writers and good editors think about whether the argument structure of each verb makes sense; some kinds of verbs, for example, can be performed only by certain kinds of subjects. An animal, an inanimate object or a natural event can kill a person, but only another human being can murder one, because murder is defined as the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another. The questions to ask of each verb are whether its agent can really perform that action and, where there is a direct object, whether the verb is really transitive and expresses something really happening to that object. A dictionary often helps with these decisions: besides definitions, it gives examples of how words are used, and these often show the argument structures appropriate for particular nouns and verbs.
Checking each sentence
In reviewing one's own writing or editing someone else's, it helps to go through the piece backward, sentence by sentence, so as to analyse each sentence individually, in these steps:
- Find the nouns and the verbs.
- Ask how they relate: which noun is doing which verb, and what direct and indirect objects each verb is taking.
- Check whether the noun-verb transactions make literal sense.
- Check that each verb is used in a way that corresponds to a definition in Merriam-Webster's.
The analysis is time-consuming at first but quickly becomes second nature.