Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Transitive/Intransitive Verbs: Strive Vs Vow

I'm struggling with some semantics around transitive/intransitive verbs. Let me give one specific example to illustrate.




The mayor vowed to reduce crime 1




We must all strive to do better 2




Both these sentences come from Merriam-Webster, but it lists the verb vow as taking an object (transitive), but strive as taking no object (intransitive). As far as I can see they're both examples of verb + infinitive, so should be treated the same. I don't see whatever grammatical difference exists.

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