Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

On the Syntactic and Semantic Alignment

of Attributive and Identificational Constructions*

Linda Schwartz

Indiana University

0. Introduction

A major focus of interest in recent syntactic analyses within formal syntac­

tic frameworks including Relational Grammar and Government-Binding

has been the distinction between two types of intransitive verbs, where sub­

jects of one type pattern syntactically like objects of active transitive sen­

tences and subjects of passive sentences, among others, but the subjects of

the other type of intransitive pattern like subjects of active transitive sen­

tences. Following Merlan (1985) and Van Valin (1990), I will refer to this

phenomenon as "split intransitivity". The term "subjective" will be applied

to inflectional patterns in which the intransitive subject patterns like the

transitive subject or in which auxiliary selection is like that of clauses with

active transitive verbs, and the term "objective" will be applied to inflec­

tional patterns where the intransitive subject patterns like the transitive

object or in which auxiliary selection is not like that of clauses with active

transitive verbs.^1 One issue associated with the investigation of this distinc­

tion is the question of the predictability of the subjective and objective

intransitive verbal classes on semantic grounds.^2 For example, Perlmutter

& Postal (1984) hypothesize that predicates which entail protagonist control

of the event will be subjective. However, Rosen (1984) argues that the syn­

tactic distinction is not totally predictable from the semantics of the predi­

cates. To support this position, she presents evidence that verbs vary cross-

linguistically as to which syntactic class they fall into. For example, the verb

meaning "die" is subjective in Choctaw but objective in Italian, "sweat" is