Transitivity in Wan An overview of constructions and verb classes

International audience This is a first sketch of a typologically informed survey of transitivity in Wan, aSoutheastern Mande language spoken in central Cote d’Ivoire. I focus, in particular,on two issues that are clearly relevant to typology but insufficiently studied, bothfrom the formal theoretic point of view and from the point of view of their crosslinguistic representation. One issue relates to the relationship between transitivity of constructions and transitivity of individual verbs, which varies widely acrosslanguages. The data from Wan presents a case for a rather flexible treatment ofverbs with respect to their transitivity: while constructions can be strictly divided intotransitive and intransitive ones, the boundary between transitive and intransitiveverbs cannot be so easily drawn. The other issue has to do with cross-linguistic variation in lexical transitivity classes, and with developing an account able to capture differences in selectional restrictions that different classes of verbs impose on their arguments. Wan makes a distinction between two types of object that has no direct parallel in European languages; the distinction between the two types of transitive verb turns out to be much more rigid in Wan than the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs.