ABSTRACT
While completing this essay I read M.A.K.Halliday’s inaugural lecture1 in which he argues that “It is thus the clause rather than the verb that is transitive or intransitive” though elsewhere he amplifies this by the comment that “This does not mean that such a classification is irrelevant: the verb classes represent the potentiality on the part of each verb of entering into each of the sets of relations involved.”2
