A verb is transitive if and only if it usually occurs with a direct object and in such occurrences it is said to occur transitively Thus ‘ate’ occurs transitively in ‘I ate the meat and left the vegetables’ but not in ‘I ate then left’ perhaps it is not the same verb ‘left’ in these two examples but it seems to be the same ‘ate’ A verb is intensional if the verb phrase VP it forms with its complement is anomalous in at least one of three ways i substituting one expression for another that is coreferential with it in the complement of the verb can change the truthvalue of the sentence in which the VP occurs – for instance you might admire Mark Twain but not Samuel Clemens not realizing that your pesky neighbor Sam is the famous writer in this case substitution of the coreferential ‘Samuel Clemens’ for ‘Mark Twain’ in the VP ‘admire Mark Twain’ will turn a true sentence ‘you admire Mark Twain’ into a false one ‘you admire Samuel Clemens’ ii the VP admits of a special “unspecific” reading if it contains a quantifier or a certain type of quantifier Quine’s example 1956185 is famous he observes that if we paraphrase ‘I want a sloop’ as ‘there is a specific sloop such that I want it’ this will give the wrong idea if all I want is ‘mere relief from slooplessness’ a sloop but no specific one for more examples see section 1 and iii the normal existential commitments of names and existential quantifiers in the complement are suspended even when the embedding sentence is negationfree again see section 1 Intensional phenomena are puzzling and worth studying because a it seems that the only way to account for languagespeakers’ capacities to produce and understand sentences of their native languages which they have never encountered before is to posit compositional structure in language and an interpretive capacity in speakers that exploits it But b the simplest ideas about what such structure is like cannot accommodate intensionality So we want to know what the smallest complication is which allows for the intensional Investigation of intensional verbs has focussed mainly on verbs used to make propositional attitude reports These verbs take clauses rather than direct objects as their complements However as we will see below intensional transitive verbs henceforth ITVs do not merely duplicate the problems raised by propositional attitude verbs but introduce special difficulties of their own