Transitive and intransitive: What is the difference?

I’m unclear about the distinction between intransitive and transitive verbs, but perhaps the distinction’s a leaky abstraction

SVO, SVOO, and perhaps SVC and SVOC are transitive and the rest, ie SV and SVA are intransitive. The S,O,C,A represent required arguments.

'A: Do you like icecream. B: I like.'

is ungrammatical. If B doesn’t want to say ‘it’, they have to say ‘B: I do.’

So ‘like’ is SVO and transitive.

Recently there was a discussion on ##English on the freenode IRC network of ‘self-diagnose oneself’ as a pleonasm, and on looking for instances of that at books.google.com/ngrams, I found ‘self-diagnose’ without an object, ‘self-diagnose one’s ailments’ and ‘self-diagnose oneself’.

When you self-diagnose, you are essentially assuming that you know the subtleties that diagnosis constitutes.

Don't Even Try to Self-Diagnose These 5 Ailments 

The problem with self-diagnosing yourself isn’t that you may be completely wrong in the actual diagnosis; it’s that you may skip critical treatment ..

SV, SVO, SVC. That’s not the same behavior as ‘like’. But I guess you can say, ‘I like myself.’

I imagine “self-diagnose” is mostly used passively. in which case it will be taking a semantic object, or whatever you call it. (not a grammatical object, but if you were to rearrange it to be non-passive, it would have a grammatical object)

Maxdamantus: What do you mean by grammatical/semantic object?

‘it’ is a grammatical object? And ‘ice-cream’ is a semantic object?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_(grammar)

The subject of the passive voice clause, which would be the object of the same thing expressed in active voice, (and which can be considered the object of the action) would be the semantic object.

Oh, like patient role is the common semantics of the accusative case. https://www.thefreedictionary.com/patient+role ?

English doesn’t really have an accusative, and the subject of the passive sentence (which would be in the object form in the active sentence (except that English lacks productive morphological distinctions for these cases anyway)) would be in the nominative though

But yes to the patient role being, at least broadly, what is being referred to.

I had doubts about ‘self-diagnose’ as mostly used in the passive (as suggested by Maxdamantus), but all the quotes at https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Self-diagnosed are in the passive.

Tumblr User: I've been self-diagnosed with [long list of disorders].
Friend: Have you confirmed this with a psychiatrist?
Tumblr User: No, doctors freak me out.

Restated in active voice as ’(null) self-diagnosed me with [long list of disorders], the semantic object is “me”.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_(grammar) , the 3 ways to tell if a noun is an object are to

1. try to make it the subject of a passive sentence,
2. look for its position in a strict word-order language like English, and
3. use its morphological case in other languages.

A fourth way I saw on another site is to make the question, eg,

[What|Who] do you self-diagnose?

And then you can tell if the sentence is intranstive or transitive.

I didn’t know about object-deletion verbs, of which ‘self-diagnose’ and ‘eat’ would be an example, and which appear in the wikipedia article.

Yeah, taking “I” or one of the other fully inflected personal pronouns is a very good tool if you’re not sure

I do the same in Finnish because the accusative is not morphologically distinct for common nouns (the partitive which is the other Finnish object case is distinct)

English is (fairly) strict word order in large part because it doesn’t have any productive object case, so you can’t use that to distinguish.

‘eat’ and ‘self-diagnose’ are what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_(grammar) is calling object-deletion verbs. There may or may not be an object, unlike ‘like’ which requires at minimum the dummy object, ‘it’.

It’s interesting how much we use the dummy object in English, more than in some other languages I think (which might be related to lack of productive object cases again to be fair)

I think for instance that Finnish always allows object-deletion at least in the context of responses to predicate questions

There was huge spike in ‘self-diagnosed’ in books published from the early 1930s to the mid 1950s, peaking in 1942-3 and equalling the levels now achieved by ‘self-diagnosed’ and ‘self-diagnose’

Something I’ve found useful in grammar study is actually writing out my own grammar in a notebook, just as a random suggestion