prototypical active, transitive verb, rendering it intransitive.26 However, again following Allan, it seems to me that with respect to transitivity the middle voice is a marked coding of a departure from the prototypical transitive verb event, while not rendering the verb “intransitive” per se.27 To unpack this concept we need to back up a bit and first establish the prototype. Recent linguistic studies have established that transitivity is not an absolute category but a relative one; that is, transitivity