Clause Structure and Adjuncts in Austronesian Languages

349 Pages·2006·53.18 MB·English

by  Hans-Marten Gärtner (Editor)

Clause Structure and Adjuncts in Austronesian Languages
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Studies in Generative Grammar 87
Editors
Henk van Riemsdijk
Jan Köster
Harry van der Hulst
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Clause Structure and Adjuncts
Austronesian Languages
edited by
Hans-Martin Gärtner
Paul Law
Joachim Sabel
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.
The series Studies in Generative Grammar was formerly published by
Foris Publications Holland.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clause structure and adjuncts in Austronesian languages / edited by
Hans-Martin Gärtner, Paul Law, Joachim Sabel.
p. cm. — (Studies in generative grammar ; 87)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-3-11-019005-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 3-11-019005-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Austronesian languages - Clauses. 2. Austronesian langua-
ges — Word order. 3. Philippines — Languages — Clauses. 4. Gram-
mar, Comparative and general - Syntax. I. Gärtner, Hans-Martin.
II. Law, Paul S. III. Sabel, Joachim, 1962- . IV. Series.
PL5035.C53 2006
499'.2—dc22
2006007370
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek
Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at <http://dnb.ddb.de>.
ISBN-13: 978-3-11-019005-2
ISBN-10: 3-11-019005-2
ISSN 0167-4331
© Copyright 2006 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin.
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this
book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publisher.
Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin.
Printed in Germany.
Contents
Preface vii
Hans-Martin Gärtner, Paul Law, and Joachim Sabel
Clause Structure and Adjuncts in Austronesian Languages:
A Critical Introductory Survey 1
Hans-Martin Gärtner, Paul Law, and Joachim Sabel
The Guest Playing Host:
Adverbial Modifiers as Matrix Verbs in Kavalan 43
Henry Yungli Chang
Seediq - Adverbial Heads in a Formosan Language 83
Arthur Holmer
Patterns of Phrasal Movement: The Niuean DP 125
Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, and Diane Massam
Rigidity versus Relativity in Adverbial Syntax:
Evidence from Tagalog 151
Daniel Kaufman
The Cleft Structure of Malagasy ^-Questions 195
Eric Potsdam
Three Systems of Remnant Movement II and
Extraction from Specifier Position 233
Craig Thiersch
Voice Morphology in Malagasy as Clitic Left Dislocation or
Through the Looking Glass: Malagasy in Wonderland 281
Lisa deMena Travis
List of Contributors 319
Subject Index 321
Index of Adverbials, Adjectives, and Particles 327

Preface
Hans-Martin Gärtner, Paul Law, and Joachim Sabel
Modern linguistic theory is mostly developed from studying more familiar
languages like English, German or Italian. It is thus natural to bring less
familiar languages like those in the Austronesian language family to bear.
In this way one can see to what extent various hypotheses regarding the
grammatical structure of natural language hold cross-linguistically. Given
that Austronesian languages are superficially very different from most
European languages, they are a good testing ground for theories that are
based on well-known languages like English, German or Italian.
Clause structure has long been a major focus of attention in the formal
analysis of Germanic and Romance languages, but the same rigorous
approach to clause structure in Austronesian languages has a much shorter
history. Given the superficial differences between the two language
families - predicate-first vs. non-predicate-first declarative sentences, the
restriction on extraction, etc. - attempts to capture what they have in
common are few and far between. A central question is whether the strong
claim can be upheld that clause structure may be universal, or whether we
have to adopt a weaker position, i.e. that languages vary with respect to
clause structure.
Within approaches to understand the clause structure of natural
languages, the syntax of adjuncts - adverb(ial)s as well as attributive
adjectives - has only recently been the locus of intense and fruitful investi-
gation of cross-linguistic phrase structure. Cinque's (1999) assumption that
the universal order of adverbials is related to a universal hierachy of
functional projections is a prominent approach in this respect. As for
studies on adverbials in some Austronesian languages, they are relatively
rare. To the extent that one finds it, they are mostly from the morphological
point of view, e.g. Li's (2003) work on the Formosan language Thao.
Three notable exceptions are the description of the positioning of some
adverbs in Tagalog by Schachter and Otanes (1972), and the two formal
analyses of adverbs in Malagasy (Rackowski 1998; Rackowski & Travis
2000). For these reasons we believe that it is time to devote some serious
attention to the syntactic properties of adjuncts and bring them to bear on
viii Hans-Martin Gärtner, Paul Law, and Joachim Säbel
clause structure. The papers collected for this volume, most of which
contain empirical data that are little known, are a contribution toward this
goal. They are concerned with the theoretical issues of clause structure and
the syntax of adjuncts in Austronesian languages.
Most of the papers stemmed from a special session on the same topics
that was part of the 11th Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association
(AFLA XI) conference held in ZAS (Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwis-
senschaft / Center for General Linguistics, Typology, and Universals
Research), Berlin, on April 25, 2004.
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the DFG
(Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft / German Science Foundation).
Finally, we thank Mechthild Bernhard and Paul David Doherty for their
invaluable assistance in turning the manuscript into a book.
The contributions
GÄRTNER, Hans-Martin, Paul LAW, and Joachim SABEL
Clause Structure and Adjuncts in Austronesian Languages: A Critical
Introductory Surrey
In this chapter, we first lay out the three well-known properties of the
Philippine-type languages, namely, voice, predicate-first and the restriction
on extraction, as these have a bearing on clause structure and the syntax of
adjuncts. More specifically, we discuss three formal approaches to the
relation between voice and the structural position of the arguments, and the
various issues that arise in each of them. We consider how variants of
Guilfoyle, Hung & Travis's (1992) analysis of sentence structure may
account for the predicate-first property, bringing them to bear on Kayne's
(1994) Antisymmetry Hypothesis, and how the well-known restriction on
extraction in Austronesian languages may shed some light on the structural
position of the extracted argument, and on the extraction of adjuncts.
We then turn to the positioning of adjuncts in Austronesian languages,
bring it to bear on recent proposals concerning the way in which adjuncts
come to be in the position they are, i.e. whether they occur in a fixed
hierarchical order of functional categories (Cinque 1999) or whether their
positioning is a result of the syntactic correlates of the semantic relations
(Ernst 2002). As it turns out, the facts in Austronesian languages
considered in the remaining chapters have a direct bearing on the two
Preface ix
views. Lastly, we discuss the issue of adjunct extraction. The issue is of
special interest, since from the perspective of linguistic theory based on
familiar languages like English and German it is not obvious why
extraction of adjuncts is not subject to the stringent restriction on
extraction of arguments.
CHANG, Henry Yungli
The Guest Playing Host: Adverbial Modifiers as Matrix Verbs in Kavalan
This chapter suggests that inflected adverbs in Kavalan have the syntax of
serial verb construction (SVC). They are of two types. One type
comprising manner, iterative / time-related and frequency adverbs taking
non-active focus morphology has the property that the cooccurring
thematic verb (the verb assigning a thematic role to the argument) must
have active focus morphology, the same restriction on the thematic verb
appearing after a phasal / aspectual verb like siangatu ('begin') in one type
of SVC. The other type of adverbs to which frequency adverbs taking
active focus morphology belong lacks the property of the first type with
respect to the restriction on the co-occurring thematic verb. This latter type
resembles the other type of SVC, in which an adjectival predicate co-
occurs with a thematic verb with either active focus or non-active focus
morphology. It is suggested that inflected adverbs form complex predicates
with the following verbs, and the two jointly assign Case and a theta-role
to the arguments.
Chang speculates that the morphological restriction on the following
verbs and the lack thereof is due to the extent to which the adverbs are
closely bound to the verbs with respect to event integration on a scale that
also applies to the different types of complements, finite vs non-finite with
an infinitival marker vs non-finite without an infinitival marker in English
(Givon 1980).
HOLMER, Arthur
Seediq - Adverbial Heads in a Formosan Language
In this chapter it is shown that some adverbs in Seediq inflect
morphologically like verbs in that they attract clitic pronouns, take voice
morphology and appear in a special connegative morphology when occur-