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This study builds on earlier work by Artawa (1994) and Artawa and Blake (1997). It differs from the earlier work in that it is based on text and it seeks to identify factors that influence the choice of one construction rather than another; in particular, it seeks to find the principles that underlie the choice between the two major constructions for transitive verbs, an unmarked one in which the Patient is chosen as subject, and a construction with a nasalprefixed verb where the Agent is chosen as subject. The corpus consists of 250 pages of contemporary conversational material plus 30 pages of traditional narrative. Balinese is well known for its speech levels which differ greatly in lexicon, including function words, but little in morpho-syntax. Most of the conversational material used here is low level, but some of it is high. The predominantly high material comes from impromptu plays where actors are given parts and an outline story but no text. The stories contain both low and high level forms. No account is taken of level in this paper.