Verbs that require only two arguments, a subject and a single direct object, are monotransitive.

This is in contrast to monotransitive verbs, which take only one object, a direct or primary object.

Monotransitive verbs are verbs that take two arguments.

In addition, certain ditransitive verbs can also act as monotransitive verbs:

For example in West Greenlandic, the direct object of a monotransitive verb appears in the absolutive case:

In the second example, the applicative suffix -ira converts the (usually monotransitive) verb gamba to a ditransitive.

Similarly, in Lahu, both the patient of a monotransitive verb and the recipient of a ditransitive verb are marked with the postposition thàʔ:

Alignment of ditransitive with monotransitive case roles", a message to the CONLANG mailing list of 17 May 2005"

A secundative language is a language in which the recipients of ditransitive verbs are treated like the patients of monotransitive verbs and the themes get distinct marking.

In a secundative language, the recipient of a ditransitive verb is treated in the same way as the single object of a monotransitive verb, and this syntactic category is called primary object.

It must have been made clear from the above examples that those verbs are bivalent ones (or monotransitive) and not ditransitive, i.e. they have no other semantic argument except their subject and the supplementary participial clause itself.

Just as the way the arguments of intransitive and transitive verbs are aligned in a given language allows one sort of typological classification, the morphosyntactic alignment between arguments of monotransitive and ditransitive verbs allows another kind of classification.