This chapter focuses on grammatical resources for construing experience – transitivity. It begins with a basic introduction to experiential clause structure, covering participants, processes and circumstances. It then presents the distinctive structures of material, mental, relational and verbal clauses. The meaning potential of each clause type is consolidated in a system network whose realisation in structure is specified. Following a discussion of diathesis (covering voice and causatives), a range of types of circumstance are surveyed.

A predication prototypically predicates an event. Events have multiple participants in their semantic frame. Some participants are more central than others. The information packaging of event participants construes certain participants as core arguments and others as oblique arguments. Transitivity constructions are defined in terms of the prototypical expression of central participants as core argument phrases. ‘Subject’ and ‘object’ are defined crosslinguistically in terms of degree of topicality (salience) and force dynamics (subject acting on object). Basic argument encoding strategies are flagging, indexation, and word order. An exemplar approach to defining transitive constructions is taken, using the agentive change of state event of breaking as the exemplar event, following Haspelmath. Subject generally precedes verb and object in word order. Variation in alignment is based on the system of transitive and intransitive constructions, in terms of which core argument of the transitive construction the intransitive argument aligns with, including the rare case where the core arguments of intransitive constructions are split between transitive subject and object.

This chapter builds on Chapter 5 by considering data collection methods in more detail as it focuses on the design of data collection instruments. There are many useful and detailed texts available that describe the intricacies of data collection instrument design, and this chapter presents important considerations when designing instruments that are commonly used in practitioner research. As with all chapters in this book, this chapter includes examples from real-life case studies to illustrate the ideas presented and to allow discussion of their application. The chapter begins with a discussion about the selection of participants before moving on to consider selection of data and data collection methods. We will consider ways to ensure that research is robust and defendable, especially in the case of qualitative methods, which we believe have great value for practitioners.