Dravidian syntax and universal grammar

705 Pages·2016·47.349 MB·English

by  Jayaseelan

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Dravidian Syntax and Universal Grammar
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OXFORD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE SYNTAX
Richard Kayne, General Editor
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Richard S. Kayne Jessica Coon
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Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 4 Christina Tortora
Guglielmo Cinque
Cross- Linguistic Studies of Imposters and
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Restructuring in West Germanic Edited by Chris Collins
Roland Hinterhölzl
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The Syntax of Ellipsis: Evidence from Dutch Dialects Edited by Mamoru Saito
Jeroen van Craenenbroeck
Micro- Syntactic Variation in North American
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Syntactic Structures, Volume 5 Edited by Raffaella Zanuttini and Laurence
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Mapping Spatial PPs: The Cartography of Syntactic Functional Structure from Top to Toe: The
Structures, Volume 6 Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 9
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The Grammar of Q: Q- Particles, Wh- Movement, Chinese Syntax in a Cross- linguistic Perspective
and Pied- Piping Edited by Edited by Y.- H. Audrey Li,
Seth Cable Andrew Simpson, and W.- T. Dylan Tsai
Comparisons and Contrasts The Architecture of Determiners
Richard S. Kayne Thomas Leu
Discourse- Related Features and Functional Projections Beyond Functional Sequence: The Cartography of
Silvio Cruschina Syntactic Structures, Volume 10
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Functional Heads: The Cartography of Syntactic
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Adverbial Clauses, Main Clause Phenomena and Argument Licensing and Agreement
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Variation in Datives and Amaya Mendikoetxea
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Dravidian Syntax
and Universal Grammar
K. A. Jayaseelan
R. Amritavalli
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1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jayaseelan, K. A., author. | Amritavalli, R., author.
Title: Dravidian syntax and universal grammar : Jayaseelan-Amritavalli papers /
K.A. Jayaseelan, R. Amritavalli.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2017] |
Series: Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax
Identifiers: LCCN 2016025663 | ISBN 9780190630225 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190630249 (updf) | ISBN 9780190630256 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Dravidian languages—Syntax. | Dravidian languages—Grammar,
Comparative. | Generative grammar.
Classification: LCC PL4604 .J29 2016 | DDC 494.8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025663
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
I | Scrambling and Word Order
1. IP-Internal Topic and Focus Phrases  3
K. A. Jayaseelan
2. Question Words in Focus Positions  44
K. A. Jayaseelan
3. Scrambling in the Cleft Construction in Dravidian 71
K. A. Jayaseelan and R. Amritavalli
4. Stacking, Stranding, and Pied- Piping: A Proposal about Word Order  93
K. A. Jayaseelan
II | The Syntax of questions and quantifiers
5. Questions and Question- Word Incorporating Quantifiers in Malayalam  129
K. A. Jayaseelan
6. Question and Negative Polarity in the Disjunction Phrase  162
R. Amritavalli
7. Comparative Morphology of Quantifiers  180
K. A. Jayaseelan
8. Question Particles and Disjunction  208
K. A. Jayaseelan
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vi
vi Contents
9. Nominal and Interrogative Complements in Kannada  222
R. Amritavalli
10. Decomposing Coordination: The Two Operators of Coordination 239
K. A. Jayaseelan
III | Finiteness and Negation
11. Kannada Clause Structure  255
R. Amritavalli
12. Some Developments in the Functional Architecture of the Kannada Clause  275
R. Amritavalli
13. Finiteness and Negation in Dravidian 299
R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan
14. The Acquisition of Negation in Tamil 336
R. Amritavalli and Deepti Ramadoss
15. Coordination, Relativization and Finiteness in Dravidian  365
K. A. Jayaseelan
16. Separating Tense and Finiteness: Anchoring in Dravidian  388
R. Amritavalli
IV | Case and Argument Structure
17. The Genesis of Syntactic Categories and Parametric Variation 417
R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan
18. The Possessor/ Experiencer Dative in Malayalam  434
K. A. Jayaseelan
19. The Serial Verb Construction in Malayalam  453
K. A. Jayaseelan
20. The Argument Structure of the Dative Construction  478
K. A. Jayaseelan
21. Syntactic Categories and Lexical Argument Structure  490
R. Amritavalli
22. Parts, Axial Parts and Next Parts in Kannada  502
R. Amritavalli
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Contents vii
23. The Dative Case in the Malayalam Verb  517
K. A. Jayaseelan
24. Rich Results  540
R. Amritavalli
V | Anaphors and Pronouns
25. Anaphorization in Dravidian  573
R. Amritavalli
26. Anaphors as Pronouns  589
K. A. Jayaseelan
27. Blocking Effects and the Syntax of Malayalam Taan 641
K. A. Jayaseelan
28. Deixis in Pronouns and Noun Phrases 659
K. A. Jayaseelan and M. Hariprasad
Language Index 675
Name Index 677
Subject Index 682
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Preface
The papers included in this volume are a selection from the work on Dravidian done by the
two authors over the last thirty years— the earliest paper here is dated 1984.
A brief introduction to Dravidian may be useful to readers who are unfamiliar with this
group of languages. The Dravidian languages are spoken principally in southern India.
But there are a few isolated Dravidian languages in the sub- Himalayan belt, and one has
been discovered in Pakistan. Altogether 26 languages have been counted. But the principal
Dravidian languages are Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. These four languages, each
with its own writing system and long literary tradition— the Tamil literary tradition dates
back to 500 BCE or earlier— currently have millions of speakers, and are sometimes referred
to as the “major” Dravidian languages. These are the languages that figure in this volume.
There are typological descriptions of these four languages, which the reader who wishes to
have an over- all picture of any one of them may wish to consult: Krishnamurti and Gwynn
(1985) (Telugu), Lehmann (1989) (Tamil), Sridhar (1990) (Kannada), Asher and Kumari
(1997) (Malayalam). For information about the geographical spread of the Dravidian lan-
guages, a list of these languages, speaker statistics, and the proto- history of Dravidian, the
most accessible source is Krishnamurti (2003). A “principled typology” of just the anaphoric
systems of the above- mentioned four principal languages can be found in Lust et.al. (2000).
A useful bibliographical tool for the Dravidian scholar is Ramaiah (1994–2 005), a six volume
bibliography of Dravidian languages and linguistics.
The papers in this volume are grouped into sections under five thematic heads. We now
give a brief indication of the main concerns of these sections, reserving a more detailed dis-
cussion of them to the mini- prefaces that we give at the beginning of each section.
A commonly noted typological feature of the Dravidian languages is that they are head-
final but that they otherwise have free word order. We deal with free word order— always
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