Thoughts for January 30:
I’ve been away from posting on the thread, but have still been hard at work with converb things!
You may have summarized from my disjointed ramblings that I want to do something vaguely digital with my converb data and my converb feature sheet. Well, it’s happening, thanks very much to our own Dr. Pat – and anyone else on our lovely forum. 
You can follow that specific journey here:
What have I been working on otherwise?
Lots of things – but in particular, I got to do a very chill presetantion for a student colloquium about my thesis project. It was a good opportunity to think about my project and my goals and how to articulate that. What I also got out of the presentation was a ton of questions to follow up on, which I’m pretty pumped about.
So, apparently, for Abkhaz converbs, when formed with a transitive verb stem, the subject marker (also on the verb) is overall not obligatory (only sometimes). However, when converbs are formed with an intransitive verb stem, the subject marker is generally obligatory. Why is this? Not really sure. Aristava 1960 mentions it briefly and says it has to do with the historical development of something (??) in Abkhaz – and also polypersonalism. Or something??? (It was in Russian; I didn’t pay much attention to it at first, but now my interest is, of course, the most renewed). Currently, I am looking everywhere for this article (cited in Aristava 1960 as a recommendation for a fuller discussion):
К. В. Ломтатидзе. Бессубъектные формы абхазского переходного глагола. Иберийско-кавказское языковедение, том II, Тбилиси, 1948, стр. 1-13.
I haven’t found it yet, but I will.
The other thing that will be followed by a lot of question marks (expressing super serious linguistic interest, naturally) is that intransitive verbs, somehow, all have to mark for a (direct?) object??? Or something??? About objects??? Apparently, you can have an instransitive verb that is also bivalent. This is news to me because in my head valency = transitivity and intransitive = valency of 1. However, my mind was recently blown when a linguist friend who knows more than me said that, actually, transitivity is based on the presence of the direct object. So, I guess this means indirect objects don’t count? Like whatever is happening in this English sentence (which was given to me as an example):
I was given a book.
Looks transitive to me 
But what I’m thinking is perhaps in this structure, “I” is, syntactically, the subject, and “book” is…the indirect object (???) and, therefore, it’s not transitive even though, to me, it looks transitive 
So, yes, I was today years old in PhD student-ness when encountered this phenomenon 
Summary:
Transitive and intransitive verbs happened (why is the subject marker obligatory for intransitive verb stem converbs but not necessarily transitive verb stem converbs 
)
Transitivity is not the same thing as valency (???) also happened