Can the verb 'to be' be used intransitively, as in "I am." OR "It was."?
I don't mean as an answer to a question, when there is all kinds of implied content. I mean as a complete sentence. And I also don't mean in a philosophical context, like "I think, therefore, I am."
We can't say something like "I am happily." We would say "I exist happily." So can we ever use 'to be' in an intransitive sense like 'to exist'?
Note that I mean 'without auxiliaries'. "It cannot be!" uses auxiliaries.
If we can't use 'to be' intransitively, then it shouldn't be able to take adverbs without an object. But oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/here considers 'here' to be only ever an adverb. So "I am here" would be subject/intransitive verb/adverb.
Can someone unwind this conundrum?
Let us first clearly distinguish and describe the two senses of "to be" that we are talking about:
- The copula or linking verb "to be", very approximately synonymous with the transitive verb "to equal" (as in a sentence like "Bob is a man" or "The towel is wet").
- The intransitive "to be" (i.e. the form that takes no object or complement), which expresses either:
- existence or presence, synonymous with either "to exist" (as in a sentence like "There [is/exists] a prime number smaller than 5." or with verbs like "to sit"/"to stand"/"to lie" (as in a sentence like "The book [is/sits/stands/lies] on the window sill.", or
- occurrence or veracity, synonymous with verbs like "to occur" or "to happen" or with "to be the case" (as in a sentence like "What shall be, shall be." or "That cannot be!")
(Copulae are not generally considered "transitive", and thus many dictionaries - confusingly, I think! - actually classify them as intransitive. Under that definition of "intransitive", the answer to the headline question here is a trivial and uninteresting "yes" - "to be" is used "intransitively" in a sentence like "Bob is a man", in which "a man" is not an "object" but rather a "subject complement". But here, in the same spirit as the use of the term in the question, I will treat copulae as a third category and speak of the "intransitive" form of "to be" to mean the form that is neither transitive nor copular.)
Along the same lines as the analysis given in the question, it seems to me that the intransitive form of "to be" does exist in modern English but is curiously and rather arbitrarily restricted to a very particular set of permitted contexts. Particularly curious is that some of these permitted uses superficially look like they are using the copular form of "to be", but on closer analysis only seem to make sense if interpreted as the intransitive existential form.
Ideally we could mentally test whether a particular use of "to be" is the intransitive form or the copula by considering whether it can be replaced with a synonym (without rendering the sentence grammatically incorrect or significantly changing its meaning). This usually works for the intransitive form - if a particular use of "is" could be replaced by "exists", then surely it is the intransitive "is" and not the copula. But it is more awkward to consider replacing the copula, because the copular form lacks an adequate synonym - "Bob equals a man" is a very awkward sentence, and "The towel equals wet" is probably not even grammatical.
Instead, a useful test to confirm or disconfirm whether a use of "to be" can be understood as a use of the copula is to consider whether "to become" - likewise a "linking verb", albeit with a different meaning - can be used in its place. This confirms that "Bob is a man" and "The towel is wet" are uses of the copula - "Bob becomes a man" and "The towel becomes wet" are surely at least grammatical sentences.
Below I shall list all of the accepted uses of the intransitive "be" that I can think of.
Use with an adverb of place or adverbial expression of place
Examples:
- I am here.
- You are there.
- There you are!
- Bob is in the garden.
- Where is Bob?
- I am where Bob is.
- Dad is home.
- The dog is outside.
One might parse these as uses of a copula - as equating "I" with "here" or "Bob" with "in the garden", etc - but I suggest this is probably the wrong analysis and these sentences are better understood as using the intransitive "to be". As evidence for this, I note that we can freely replace "am"/"is"/"are" with "exist[s]" here - "I exist here", "Bob exists in the garden" - and the sentence, while slightly unnatural, still makes sense and conveys the same meaning. We absolutely cannot substitute in "to become", though. Sentences like "I become here." or "Bob is becoming in the garden" are ungrammatical nonsense.
(Naively, one might note the apparent similarity in structure between "There/Where is Bob" and "That/Who is Bob" and assume the former must be using the same "is" as the latter, i.e. the copula... but the test with "become" convinces me that this is not the case. We can validly say, perhaps while pointing to an antenatal scan from when Bob was a foetus, "That is becoming Bob" but it is simply not grammatical to say "There is becoming Bob", which suggests to me that "That is Bob" and "There is Bob" actually use the word "is" in totally different senses.)
Use with "there" as a dummy adverb of place
Examples:
- There are infinitely many prime numbers.
- There is no need to apologise.
- What evidence is there that vaccines cause autism?
- How many people are there here?
Here once again "to be" is being used synonymously with "to exist". A grammatical curiosity is that in the first two examples above we can simply replace are/is with "exist[s]" - e.g. "There exist infinitely many prime numbers" - or we can use "exists" without the dummy "there" ("Infinitely many prime numbers exist") but in the second two sentences the only valid way to replace "to be" with "to exist" is to drop the dummy "there" ("What evidence exists?" is grammatical, but "What evidence exists there?" is not). Nonetheless none of these uses seem like the copula; we certainly cannot substitute in "to become".
Certain expressions of veracity or occurrence in conjunction with auxiliary verbs, especially modals
The most accepted uses like this are fairly specific idioms:
- It cannot be!
- What shall be, shall be.
But I imagine most native speakers would probably also consider sentences like this correct:
- Can this truly be?
- There is no sense in delaying what must be.
- Whatever I desire comes to be.
- This state of affairs cannot be.
- The future he envisages must not be.
On the other hand, it feels ungrammatical to me to say "A nuclear war cannot be", or "This state of affairs can be", and I am not really sure why. I cannot tease out of my own mind the rules that subconsciously govern which modal-accompanied uses of the veracity-/occurrence-expressing "be" are grammatical and which are not.
A handful of highly specific idioms
Ones I can think of:
- To let be - as in, "Just let him be". Here "be" is being used in the existential sense - we could just as well write "Just let him exist".
- To leave be - as in "Leave him be!". I suspect this idiom is a bastard hybrid of "To let be" with "To leave alone", since on its face it doesn't seem grammatical; the verb "to leave" doesn't normally take a bare infinitive as an object like "to let" does. While researching the point I found some corroboration of this theory in Seth T. Hurd's A Grammatical Corrector, published in 1847 in Philadelphia, which lists "Leave me be" in the "Common errors of speech" section and suggests "Let me be", "Leave me alone" or "Let me alone" as correct alternatives.
- [If/as] need[s] be, as in "We will adjust our plans if need be" or "We will adjust our plans as needs be". The best way I can see to understand the underlying grammar here is that "need[s]" is functioning as a noun, and we are saying "If need exists" or "If needs exist". Certainly no interpretation of "be" as a copula makes sense.
Famous phrases from historical works
These statements would probably simply be considered ungrammatical if penned (or rather, typed) for the first time today:
- "To be or not to be, that is the question" (from Shakespeare's Hamlet, written around 1600)
- "I think, therefore I am" (translation of "je pense, donc je suis" / "cogito ergo sum" from Descartes' works, first published in French in 1637 - but I am not actually sure how old this English translation is).
But why is English like this? These grammatical restrictions on the use of the intransitive form of "to be" seem unlike the behaviour of any other verb in the language. How and when did they arise?
I am not sure, but the far freer use of the intransitive form we see in historical works (like quoted above) at least suggests the rough shape of an answer: that a few centuries back, you could use the existential version of "to be" just as freely as you can use "to exist" today, but that somehow, over the last few centuries, this usage came to be viewed as incorrect outside of a handful of particularly sticky idiomatic uses that survived while the existential form mostly died out - leaving those surviving acceptable uses a somewhat confusing and illogical grammatical anomaly in the English of today.
As a further check of this theory, I looked at the King James Bible (published 1611, though said to have deliberately affected a somewhat archaic writing style) and it also provides plenty of evidence that the existential intransitive form of "to be" could then be used in contexts where it would be considered ungrammatical today:
And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.
-- Genesis 5:24
For as ye have drunk upon my holy mountain, so shall all the heathen drink continually, yea, they shall drink, and they shall swallow down, and they shall be as though they had not been.
-- Obadiah 1:16
Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.
-- John 8:58
Exactly when this became ungrammatical, I'm not sure - but hopefully the analysis above is at least a starting point for anyone wanting to thoroughly nail down an answer.
