It should be obvious that verbs like these `incorporated-object transitives' or transitive `absolutes' are problematical, and really need a case-frame to indicate who or what is the semantic target, if not the syntactic target, of the action. In fact Hopper and Thompson show that verbs must be scaled for degree of transitivity, since `blaming' or `seeing' is in some sense less transitive than `breaking' or `killing', actions which have a definite effect on an object, whereas to be blamed or seen does not affect the `target' of the action in the same way.
Thus to refer to u8ai 2 intr. as an intransitive kind of breaking since the process or person who caused the breaking is not known is also not as neat a distinction as one would like, even though the morphology of Tamil gives us to u8ai 's, one `intransitive', i.e. without known agent, as in ka33aa8i u8aintatu [kannaadi odenjadu] `the glass broke', the other `transitive', as in ava2 ka33aa8iyai u8aintaa2 [avan kannaadiye odenjaan] `He broke the glass.' These `intransitives' are also usually possible only with a third-person, often neuter, `subject,' i.e. `glass.' Yet to think of glass as the `subject' of `intransitive' breaking but as the object or target of transitive breaking (when the agent of the action is known), is illogical.But as anyone who has dealt with young children knows, an argument is often likely to ensue between the parent and the child over who the agent of the breaking was, with the parent claiming that the action was transitive and that there had to be an agent, while the child argues that the action had no cause and no agent---``it just broke." Parents typically contend this is not the case, and that responsibility or blame has to be assigned; children, even when found with rocks in their hands, attempt to deny this contention.