| Sumario: | Cross-linguistic observations have shown that the atelic activity sense of labile or ambitransitive verbs is formalized by means of intransitive structures (antipassive and verbs with incorporated or oblique objects), or of transitive structures which take bare nominal objects. As a central point of this paper, I show that this bare object “a mass or plural noun” does not behave syntactically like a direct object and, as a result, the corresponding construction is not transitive. The conclusion, then, is that sentences expressing atelic activity are intransitive, even though the verb takes this bare nominal. I have suggested, along with several other authors, that this object which I call a ‘pseudo-object’, following Ramchand (1997), behaves syntactically and semantically more like an adverbial modifier which has been incorporated into the verb, and that this object gives the [verb-pseudo-object] unit a sense of type or subclass.
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