AS we took up in this column last week, intransitive verbs like "gone" and "disappear" are of the kind that can't pass on their action to a direct object. This is why sentence constructions like "The magician gone the rabbit" and "The magician disappeared the rabbit" don't work. The English language allows only transitive verbs like "feed" and "eat" to take objects and act on them, as in "The magician feeds the rabbit" and "The rabbit eats the carrot."
But this doesn't mean that when the operative verb is intransitive, the subject can't ever make an action happen to an object or make that object perform the verb's action. In fact, there are verbs that enable an intransitive verb to cause its action to happen to an object. They belong to a class of verbs called causatives, the most common of which are "make," "get," "have," and "let."
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