ergative

According to Wikipedia:

[…] a labile verb […] (or ergative verb) is a verb that can be either transitive or intransitive, and whose subject when intransitive corresponds to its direct object when transitive.

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In English, most verbs can be used intransitively, but ordinarily this does not change the role of the subject; consider, for example, “He ate the soup” (transitive) and “He ate” (intransitive), where the only difference is that the latter does not specify what was eaten. By contrast, with a labile verb the role of the subject changes; consider “it broke the window” (transitive) and “the window broke” (intransitive).

For further discussion of related topics, see the Wikipedia article.

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