Friday, March 27, 2009

The Difference Between Lay and Lie


Intransitive verbs do not take objects, transitive verbs do.

6 comments:

Erin Davis said...

I love this chart! I'm going to show it to my students after spring break.

Laura Payne said...

I'm glad you like it.

I have an idea...have your students come up with some more language related graphs and charts and send them to me. I will post them on this blog and give them the credit.

Erin Davis said...

Fantastic idea. We are on spring break right now, but we'll be back in class on Thursday evening. I'll make the proposal then!

Laura Payne said...

Outstanding...we could have a lot of fun with this.

Scribbles said...

I always confuse them. I'm *pretty* sure, without looking at a grammar, that "lie" is intransitive (when used to refer to horizontal position) and "lay" is transitive. But the past tenses and the participles always get me regardless.

In Dutch it's just as confusing (liggen > lag > gelegen and leggen > legde > gelegd) -- irregular and regular, respectively.

Laura Payne said...

Scribbles,

You are right about the past tenses and participles being tricky. I just posted a chart to help with those. Here is the link - http://walkinthewords.blogspot.com/2009/03/more-help-with-difference-between-lay.html

P.S. Thank you Martha Brockenbrough for an excellent chart.

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