を without a transitive verb? > I interpret this sentence's meaning as something like, "The letter ended up being seen by someone else." From what I understand, the verb is transitive, "to see." The verb should be its passive form then, "to be seen," which should be intransitive. The particle indicates that the preceding noun is the direct object of a verb that follows it, right? So then, wouldn't make more sense? I have a feeling this might have more to do with the verb than the particle. Does not lose its transitiveness when it is put in its passive form? If so, is able to be used without a transitive verb then? Where did I go wrong?

This is the so-called "adversarial passive".

I give a detailed explanation of passives (including the "adversarial" ones) here:

> object marker in this {} sentence

In your case:


⇓ **Active Sentence** : ⇓
⇓ **Passive Sentence** : ⇓


That is to say, gets lifted to , and gets lifted to .

As mentioned in the other answer, when a -marked thing gets lifted to , it results in that thing ( in your case) being "affected", and in general that means "negatively affected".

If you were to lift to , like you suggested, it would be perfectly fine, but that sentence would lack the implications of

1. the letter being someone's (i.e., it would just be " **a** / **the** letter" as opposed to " **my** letter" or whoever the context suggests as the owner);
2. that someone being negatively affected by the seeing event.