a: Do you love me?
b: I love (you is omitted)
In this case, can we regard "love" as a transitive verb? or intransitive?
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The answer "I love" would not be idiomatic in the context you've presented. "You" is not implicit. Without a direct object, "I love" would be understood to refer to no specific object, and thus it would be intransitive. Do you eat chicken? I eat. The answer means "I eat food" but it does not mean "I eat chicken".– TimRCommented Feb 28, 2016 at 11:44
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1 Answer
There are really two issues here.
Intransitive love is not unknown. It's used to express the notion of being 'in love' or having the capacity to love, mostly in literary and theological rather than colloquial contexts. One of the most famous lines in English poetry is
Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
However I love as a response to Do you love me? is not idiomatic. An ordinary 'lexical' verb isn't ordinarily used to Code (stand for) the entire predicate it heads; only auxiliary verbs are used that way. When there's no auxiliary in the contextual or implied matrix construction, tag questions and brief responses like this employ do support, just like ordinary questions and negatives: we use do as a sort of dummy auxiliary.
Do you love me? —I do.
You love me, don't you?
answered Feb 28, 2016 at 15:59
