Split intransitivity has been an important issue in syntactic theory since the postulation of the Unaccusative Hypothesis in Relational Grammar in Perlmutter 1978; it was adapted into Government-Binding theory in Burzio 1981. In both theories, a purely syntactic approach to split intransitivity is taken. This paper argues that split-intransitive phenomena are better explained in semantic terms. The semantic analysis will be carried out in Role and Reference Grammar, which assumes the theory of verb classification proposed in Dowty 1979. The analysis will focus on Italian, Georgian, and Acehnese, languages which have been cited as providing support for the UH. It will be shown that two semantic parameters, inherent lexical aspect (Aktionsart) and agentivity, underlie split intransitivity crosslinguistically.

The Anatolian branch of Indo-European is characterized by a split-ergative case-marking system in which neuters inflect ergatively and common-gender nouns inflect accusatively; its ergative case originated via the reanalysis of an unproductive neuter instrumental marker in null-subject transitive clauses. A development from instrumental to ergative also occurred in the prehistory of the Gorokan languages of Papua New Guinea, and it is suggested that this process is a general mechanism for the development of split ergativity of this type. The well-known NP hierarchy discovered by Silverstein receives a natural interpretation as a hierarchy of instrumentality.

In the process of communicating, conversationalists constantly make decisions about their interlocutors' state of knowledge, and on the basis of these decisions make lexical, grammatical, and intonational choices about how to manage the ‘flow’ of information. This paper focuses on how such decision-making affects choices in relative clause constructions in American English conversations. On the basis of a quantitative analysis of a corpus of natural conversations, we show that the structural choices in relative clause constructions are best explained as symptoms of interactants' attention to information flow.

The child's creative contribution to the language-acquisition process is potentially most apparent in situations where the linguistic input available to the child is degraded, providing the child with ample opportunity to elaborate upon that input. The children described in this paper are deaf, with hearing losses so severe that they cannot naturally acquire spoken language, and their hearing parents have chosen not to expose them to sign language. Despite their lack of usable linguistic input, these children develop gestural communication systems which share many structural properties with early linguistic systems of young children learning from established language models. This paper reviews our findings on the structural properties of the deaf children's gesture systems and evaluates those properties in the context of data gained from other approaches to the question of the young child's language-making capacity.