Remarks on split intransitivity and fluid intransitivity

The aim of this paper is to confront the way some types of alignment variations have been dealt with in different frameworks, and to argue that some phenomena extensively discussed in the literature on unaccusativity but largely neglected by typologists (with however the notable exception of Maslova, 2006) are relevant to alignment typology, and necessitate the recognition of a type of fluid intransitivity not identified in classical works on alignment typology. The paper is organized as follows. In section 2, after recalling the definition of split intransitivity, I review the possible manifestations of split intransitivity, in the coding characteristics of core arguments and in their behavioral properties. In section 3, I briefly discuss several issues in the study of split intransitivity. Section 4 is devoted to a discussion of the relationship between the notions of split intransitivity and unaccusativity. In section 5, devoted to fluid intransitivity, I discuss some illustrations of pragmatically driven fluid intransitivity, a particular type of fluid intransitivity accounting in particular for the impersonal construction of French intransitive verbs, and I show that the recognition of this type of alignment variation converges with recent developments in generative studies of unaccusativity.