Some Problems of Transitivity in Swahili

First Published in 2004. The following essay is a tentative study of a little explored area of the delicate syntactic properties of transitivity for the language, Swahili. In eastern Africa the role of Swahili is a complicated one: it is spoken as a first language by a relatively small number of people, perhaps a million, living mainly along the East African littoral and on the off-shore islands of Pemba, Zanzibar and Mafia.