I’d appreciate a second opinion on an exercise I’m doing, that is, to determine whether the main verbs of sentences are transitive or intransitive.
The sentence is as follows:
The teacher decided against doing karaoke.
I took the main verb to be ‘to decide against’, and tagged it as transitive, on the basis that its action is transferred to ‘doing karaoke’. ‘Doing karaoke’ here being a verb phrase (or I think, more specifically, a gerund phrase), and functioning as the direct object of the main verb.
However, I’ve been advised (i) that the main verb is actually 'to decide' (rather than 'to decide against'), which can be used transitively or intransitively, and (ii) that in the sentence above, it is intransitive, on account of there being no direct object, the teacher having decided against the action.
I am maintaining that the negation of a transitive verb’s action within the context of a sentence does not somehow make the direct object, as a grammatical constituent, disappear.
I thought the presence of “against” might be complicating this, but any way I turn it, the main verb still seems to be transitive.
Thank you in advance for any help.