The crucial aspect of the split-vP proposal is the claim that the portion of syntactic structure previously identified simply as the verb phrase exhibits a (minimally) bipartite structure. Verbs themselves are necessarily complex, being made up of a v° part and a ‘V’ part. In this paper, I review some of the theoretical and empirical motivation for this more complex structure. Then I present some of the phenomena which this account has been extended to cover, phenomena which previously had not been treated syntactically. Finally, I show how the approach allows a new and perhaps more general account of a particular peculiarity of the English ‘dative shift’ alternation, namely its famous failure to extend to the Latinate portion of the English verbal inventory. The same constraint applies to the English verb-particle constructions and resultative constructions as well, and insofar as the theory treats all three of these constructions in a similar way, it may be extended to account for the applicability of the Latinate restriction to all of these cases.