Could someone explain what this means? I see it on Skritter but I only vaguely understand what it means. I'm aware of the difference between transitive and intransitive but the prefix "pre" and the addition of the word "particle" confuses me a bit.

If you're talking about 把, then this is used in the structure:

Subject + 把 + object + verb phrase

which can be roughly translated as:

Subject takes object and does verb phrase to it.

ex.

我把饼干吃完了
I ate (all of) the cookie.

把 is sort of weird but EXTREMELY useful. I think of it as the active voice. The opposite of 被.

icecream, where is it called that? Is that from some Chinese grammar book? I find the English-language grammar books call it 'the ba construction'. But I know from the Chinese textbook I use in class that some of their grammar terminology actually makes things harder to understand!

WoodenFrogs explained it. It is a bit like accusative, for instance in German - it lets you move the object to an earlier point in the sentence and then you can put something else after the verb without confusing anyone. I think most books teach it too late.

@ WoodenFrogs

I was referring to 把


@ Zeppa

I first saw it on Skritter. A cursory search on Google shows many sites use those words together. I don’t know the origin, though. It’s not that common. It’s not even on Wikipedia.

I guess the issue I’m having is that I assumed transitivity is only a property of verbs. Hence, “pretransitive particle”, would be preposterous. In my mind, it would only loosely be related, as particles are not verbs.

Maybe I’m misreading it though; does “pretransitive particle” translate as “ a particle you use before a transitive verb”?

I guess that kind of makes sense. I don't know. Japanese particles are much easier.

Hmm, don't know any Japanese. Particles have all sorts of effects, though. But I saw the term 'pre-transitive particle' is quite common on the Web, as you say.

A transitive verb takes an object.

Intransitive verb: She lives in Shanghai.
Transitive verb: The dog bites the man.

The pretransitive particle means a particle you place before the noun to make that noun an object.

In English, you have to be careful with word order. So if you say: the man bites the dog, the dog has become the object.
But in Chinese, the word order problems are even worse!

So if you say something like: The dog (ba) the man bites, you know 'the man' is the object.

I don't think I should say more because it gets confusing.

But by 'pre' they mean 'before the noun', and by 'transitive' they mean 'it makes the noun following it into the object of a transitive verb'.