On Transitivity

This paper critically discusses and contrasts some of the different conceptualisations of transitivity that have been presented in the literature, and argues that transitivity as a morphosyntactic phenomenon and effectiveness of an event as a semantic concept should be separated in discussions of transitivity, and also, like many other aspects of grammar, transitivity should be seen as a constructional phenomenon, and so each construction in a language needs to be examined separately, in natural contexts. An Appendix presents some general questions one can consider when analysing language data.