Transitivity in Kabardian

In traditional grammars of Kabardian, transitive and intransitive verbs are represented as having different rules of case assignment, as well as different order of personal prefixes. This paper shows how both case assignment and order of verbal prefixes can be accounted for by an elegant set of rules within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG ). It is also shown that in Kabardian, a large majority of transitive verbs are formed by lexical rules or morphological causativization from basic intransitives, and it is argued that there is a systematic correlation between Aktionsart and transitivity: intransitives are, as a rule, activity verbs, while their transitive correlates are active accomplishments.