I have a question regarding the following sentence.

"I aimed my remarks at Susan, but she didn't seem to notice."

I thought you should add "that" or "it" at the end of the sentence, which apparently is not necessary.

The word "notice" in the sentence seems to correspond to the preceding clause, and therefore I think should be a modifier. However, it seems to act as an intransitive verb which kind of puzzles me.

The question is, how could you know when to use an intransitive verb and not?

For example, is the following sentence I created myself also possible?

"I bought a DVD yesterday, and I watched already."

Any advice will be much appreciated.

Question

I have a question regarding the following sentence. 

"I aimed my remarks at Susan, but she didn't seem to notice."

I thought you should add "that" or "it" at the end of the sentence, which apparently is not necessary.

The word "notice" in the sentence seems to correspond to the preceding clause, and therefore I think should be a modifier. However, it seems to act as an intransitive verb which kind of puzzles me.

The question is, how could you know when to use an intransitive verb and not?

For example, is the following sentence I created myself also possible?

"I bought a DVD yesterday, and I watched already."

Any advice will be much appreciated.

naerylan · Answer

In your last example you could not use it as written because watched is almost always transitive unless it has a meaning of 'passively observed' as in "I watched as he fixed my car". For a DVD it would be correct to say "...and I watched it already".
Going back to your puzzle, notice is usually transitive but can occasionally come up alone as a kind of passive event, or you could look at it as having the word 'it' implied on the end but not spoken. You can add it (but not 'that') to the sentence about Susan and sound perfectly fine. There's only a subtle difference between having it and leaving it off.