In chapter 5 on verbs and verb morphology we saw that Kham has two basic verb types with respect to person/number agreement morphology – the transitive and the intransitive. In this chapter I will take the argumentation a step further and show that there are syntactic reasons for making finer distinctions in inherent transitivity levels and for positing various subtypes of the two basic verb categories. The discussion will be guided ultimately by ‘behavior and control’ properties – distributional peculiarities, inflectional combinations, and derivational possibilities. At times, the decision about whether to split or combine a category can be based on rather complex issues. It is not uncommon to find syntactic quirks based on the semantic nature of the verb in question. As Givón points out, ‘In some fundamental way, every lexical verb is potentially in a class of its own, and could presumably display unique syntactic properties’ (1984:86).

Because we are dealing with verbs and their arguments, not just verbal morphology, we will be dealing necessarily with simple clauses. As such, I will establish a basic constituent order for Kham and show how other syntactic notions are linked to this constituent order. We will examine also, among other things, the propositional semantics of all the basic verb types and determine how the propositions are affected by valence increasing and decreasing voice operations like the causative and passive.