DP Internal Agreement in Amharic A Reverse Agree Solution

170 Pages·2011·1.3 MB·English

Master of Philosophy in Theoretical Linguistics
Faculity of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education
University of Tromsø
LIN-3990
DP Internal Agreement in Amharic
A Reverse Agree Solution
by
Desalegn Belaynew Workneh
May 2011

DP Internal Agreement in Amharic
A Reverse Agree Solution
A Thesis Submitted by:
Desalegn Belaynew Workneh
Master of Philosophy in Theoretical Linguistics
Faculity of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education
University of Tromsø
May 2011
Supervised by:
Knut Tarald Taraldsen
CASTL, University of Tromsø
Norway

Acknowledgements
I am so pleased to acknowledge the people who assisted me for completing this thesis. First and
foremost, my deepest gratitude goes to my supervisor Tarald Taraldsen for sharing me from his
broad knowledge and experience in dealing with linguistic problems. He has been following up
the progress of my thesis with great care and commitment. His discussions thought me a lot
beyond the thesis and his ingenious suggestions are evident in every section of this thesis. He
has spent a great deal of his valuable time reading and commenting each and every page. He
earns my gratitude more than anybody else.
Many thanks to all the members of the faculty—students and teachers—for their invaluable
lessons they offered me at different times in the form of lectures and seminars—specifically for
Pavel and Gillian for introducing me to the world of syntax; for Peter and Thomas for the
helpful syntax lectures, and for Pavel Iosad for the LATEX classes.
I would also like to thank Girma Demeke and Mulusew Asrate for their valuable suggestions on
certain issues in the thesis.
Finally I would like to thank a few people—Abiyot, Abrham, Firehun, Mahder, Mekonen,
Workabeba, and Yonas— for they have been great friends of mine; for all the support and
encouragement they provide me during my studies here in Tromsø.
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Abstract
The main objective of this thesis is demonstrating that the DP internal functional elements in
Amharic are the lexicalizations of the agreement between the functional projections in higher
positions with the lexical elements in the c-command domains of these functional projections.
Thecomplexdistributionofthefunctionalelementssuchasthegender, number, definitenessand
case markers is argued to be derived via the same mechanism—Multiple/Reverse Agree.
Describing the lexical and functional elements, the thesis starts from sketching the basic
framework of the DP structure in the language. Emphasizing on the striking similarities the
functional elements exhibit, it then goes to propose that these functional elements are the
reflexes of the same syntactic operation—Multiple/Reverse Agree—established between the
functional heads (K, D, C and Num) and the lexical heads in the c-command domains of these
functional heads. By focusing on many of the issues that escaped attention in the literature
such as the dependency of the adjectival agreement on the definiteness article, the thesis comes
with a strong claim that the 𝜑 features (specifically the gender feature) merge on D, rather than
on the head noun–contra to the standard assumption. Arguing that Multiple/Reverse Agree
is an obligatory operation in definite noun phrases, the apparent optionality of the functional
elements on the modifiers is also analyzed to be an effect of a feature incorporation operation
on the PF (interface) domain of the grammar.
The placement of the traditionally dubbed ‘complementizer’ element, y¨a, is also derived in
the same way to other agreement elements. Assuming that all the ya¨-phrases, such as relative
clauses, possessives and complement phrases are headed by null C–head, the thesis derives the
complicateddistributionoftheparticleya¨ inalltheya¨-phrases inauniformfashion. Ya¨ istaken
to be, just like the rest of the functional elements in the DP, the reflex of the Multiple/Reverse
Agreement between the C and the lexical heads in the c-command domains of C.
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Contents
Acknowledgements i
Abstract iii
Contents vii
Abbreviations x
1 Introduction 1
2 The Lexical Elements 7
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2 Demonstratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.3 Locatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.4 Quantifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.4.1 Numerals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.4.2 Vague Quantifiers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.4.3 Universal Quantifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.5 Adjectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.5.1 Ordinals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.5.2 Relationals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.5.3 Regular Adjectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.6 The Head Noun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.7 Intermediate Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3 The Functional Elements 23
3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3.2 The Definite Article . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
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3.3 The Indefinite Article . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.4 Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.5 Number . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.6 Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.7 Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.8 Intermediate Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
4 Relative Clauses, Possessives and Complement Phrases 35
4.1 Introducing Y¨a . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
4.2 Y¨a as an Inflectional Morpheme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
4.3 Y¨a-phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
4.4 Relative Clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
4.5 Possessive Phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
4.6 Relational Phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
4.7 Intermediate Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
5 Previous Accounts 59
5.1 Distributed Morphology (Kramer 2009, 2010) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
5.2 RCs as DPs (Ouhalla 2004) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
5.3 Predicate Inversion (Den Dikken 2007) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
5.4 Intermediate Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
6 The Analysis 77
6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
6.2 Setting The Context: Theoretical Motivations For Multiple/Reverse Agree . . . 79
6.2.1 Head Movement (Adjunction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
6.2.2 Spec-head Agreement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
6.2.3 Agree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
6.2.4 Multiple Agree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
6.2.5 Reverse Agree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
6.3 Agreement Across the Regular Modifiers and the Head Noun . . . . . . . . . . 88
6.4 Agreement in the Y¨a-phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
6.4.1 Relative Clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
6.4.2 Possessives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
6.4.3 Complement Phrases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
6.5 Optionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
6.6 Remaining Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
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