Does Stanford NLP consider transitive/intransitive verbs when determining subject/object relationships?
<p>Does Stanford NLP take intransitive verbs into consideration when determining relationships between nouns (subjects and objects) and verbs (transitive or intransitive)?</p>

<p>I ask, as this sentence contains what I believe is an intransitive verb (laughed), and therefore can not take an object.</p>

<p><code>You have not been laughed at by us.</code></p>

<p>I'm accessing the Stanford NLP Java binary files via NLTK with Python2.7. I'm using the <code>StanfordDependencyParser</code> to detect nominal_passive_subject (<code>nsubjpass</code>) and nominal_subject (<code>nsubj</code>).</p>

<p>I believe these relationships denote passive and active clauses respectively.</p>

<p>The mentioned sentence returns <code>nsubjpass</code>, which I understand to mean the clause is passive, but I have read that laugh/laughed is intransitive, and cannot take an object and therefore, cannot be passive.</p>

<p>Or is laughed not an intransitive verb, despite what I've read?
The only examples of intransitive verbs I can find are in present tense.</p>

<p><strong>EDIT</strong></p>

<p>I'll get clarification on this and post the answer, but I'm certain that 'laugh at' can be transitive.</p>

<p>Some people use the definition 'intransitive' as evidence that a clause can not be passive, since intransitive verbs can't have objects.</p>

<p>I think it's more accurate to say some verbs are intransitive because they can't take objects.]</p>

<p>So, 'laugh' is certainly intransitive, but 'laugh at ____' clearly takes an object, and therefore modifying 'laugh' with 'at' makes the verb transitive.</p>

<p>One <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/laugh" rel="nofollow">online dictionary</a> says 'laugh at' can be transitive.</p>