La transitivité morphosyntaxique varie d'un maximum (la CBM et les verbes qui y entrent) et un minimum (la construction uniactan-cielle). Corrélativement, la transitivité sémantique varie d'un maximum (l'action prototypique) à un minimum (les procès à un seul participant).

Les variations sont elles-mêmes variables selon les langues: au sein du tableau général, dont les grandes lignes sont communes à toutes les langues, chacune a son propre choix de variations morphosyntaxiques et sémantiques, c'est-à-dire sa propre échelle de transitivité.

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Komi-Zyryan, which belongs to the Uralic languages and to the branch of Permic languages, is an agglutinative language with the predominant order SVO. Except for the order of the main constituents, it is a typical determiner-head language with postpositions, possessive suffixes, 15 cases, no gender, no congruence between adjectival attributes and their heads, and no copula in the present tense.

The temporal categories include the simple tenses (present and past, the future tense is expressed morphologically in the third person only), and the so-callpd analytic or compound tenses. Between these stands the perfect-like construction based on a past participial form without copula, sometimes called the 2nd past, sometimes unwitnessed past, and in the new grammar of Komi unwitnessed perfect. The copula may have the forms of the simple past and the 2nd past with the participial marker — dm(a), which is neutral as to active or passive. This together with the lexical verb forms produces the analytic constructions. The order of the copula and the lexical verb may vary. The term «unwitnessed» equals evidentiality and covers in the language system the same basic variants of «indirectness» as in the Turkic, Georgian, Bulgarian etc. languages where the category is being studied: quotation, hearsay, conjecture and mirativity (see e. g. [Journal of Pragmatics 2001; Johanson & Bo Utas 2000; Guentchdva 1996]).

The paradigm of vetlyny «to go»:

In the above paradigm, the tenses are labeled by terms that give an approximate content to the categories. In the grammar, the author of the section on the verb, E. A. Cypanov, cautiously uses simply numbers for the past tenses: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th past.

In the literary language and the majority of the dialects, for the first person of the perfect/unwitnessed past an impersonal construction is preferred. It consists of the genitive form of the personal pronoun/animate noun and the participle-based form with the 3rd person reflexive suffix — s'öma. The meaning of the construction is always that of an involuntary or non-conscious action:

The construction is specialized for the meaning of involuntary action in other tenses as well, and has parallels in other Finno-Ugric languages in that the demotion of the subject (nominative), adding a reflexive suffix (in Finnish, a causative suffix), the directionality, controllability of the action is cancelled. Unplanned actions are often expressed by this construction:

There is another usage for the reflexive forms. In grammars, it is presented separately as an Aktionsart which expresses finality, exhaustiveness, apparently in all tenses:

In Komi-Zyryan, a development seems to be taking place which is very natural, and possibly aided by areal influence: the genitive subject appears together with the — oma perfect, which is invariant, that is, impersonal. With transitive verbs, the object is either in the nominative or in the accusative. When nominative, the object can be called a subject, as in other languages which express their perfects with habere verbs:

The accusative object also produces a resulting state interpretation:

Note that the corresponding grammatical construction is found, though rarely, in the surrounding north Russian dialects, which use a locative possessor with accusative object and a past participle predicative form:

While it is difficult, if not impossible, to decide whether any areal influence is at work here, we may note that in Komi, there is a construction with the genitive as an agent of participial attributive forms: