Architecture of the Palauan Verbal Complex (For Summaries of Each Individual Chapter, See Chapter 1, §1.3)
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ Au Pu V C A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LINGUISTICS by Justin Nuger June 2010 The Dissertation of Justin Nuger is approved: Professor Sandra Chung, Chair Professor Judith Aissen Professor James McCloskey Professor Kie Zuraw Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Justin Nuger 2010 V I Current version: v0.2 v0.0: filed at UC Santa Cruz (and available on ProQuest) 6/2010 v0.1: single spaced, re-paginated, uploaded to website 7/2010 v0.2: some typos corrected, pagination consistent with v0.1 9/2010 C Version Information iii Abstract vii Acknowledgments viii Remarks on the Palauan Data xvii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 The broader context......................................................... 2 1.1.1 Core theoretical assumptions ........................................ 2 1.1.2 Theoretical frameworks............................................... 3 1.1.2.1 Minimalism ....................................................... 4 1.1.2.2 Late-insertion of lexical material ............................... 6 1.1.3 Empirical breadth...................................................... 9 1.2 A glimpse into the Palauan language ...................................... 12 1.2.1 The language situation ................................................ 12 1.2.2 Grammatical sketch.................................................... 15 1.2.2.1 Word order ....................................................... 16 1.2.2.2 The nominal complex........................................... 16 1.2.2.3 Pronouns and agreement morphology ....................... 24 1.2.2.4 A′ dependencies ................................................. 28 1.2.2.5 Topicalization .................................................... 33 1.3 Summary of key results...................................................... 40 2 Encoding Grammatical Relations Syntactically 43 2.1 The notion of subject........................................................ 44 2.1.1 The morphosyntax of subject agreement ........................... 44 2.1.2 The syntax of subjects................................................. 48 2.1.2.1 Expletive subjects................................................ 49 2.1.2.2 Possessor ascension.............................................. 56 2.1.2.3 Raising-to-subject constructions ............................... 60 iv 2.1.3 Interim conclusions about subjects.................................. 73 2.2 Licensing internal arguments ............................................... 84 2.2.1 An aspectual alternation............................................... 85 2.2.2 Direct objects in Palauan.............................................. 88 2.2.3 Transitivity and inner aspect (Aktionsart) .......................... 91 2.2.4 Differential object marking ........................................... 99 2.2.5 DP-licensing and morphological case ............................... 105 2.2.5.1 The role of Agree in the (narrow) syntax ..................... 105 2.2.5.2 A DM account of direct object morphology ................. 108 2.2.6 Interim conclusions about direct objects ........................... 115 3 Psych-Predicates and Phrasal Idioms 116 3.1 A typology of Palauan ψ-expressions...................................... 119 3.1.1 Ψ-idioms: the context ................................................. 122 3.1.2 Accusative ψ-arguments and (non-)incorporation ................ 127 3.2 The syntax of ψ-idioms...................................................... 132 3.2.1 A′ dependencies and ψ-idioms ...................................... 132 3.2.2 Possessor ascension, raising, and ψ-idioms......................... 140 3.2.2.1 Optional PP arguments ......................................... 142 3.2.2.2 Raising-to-subject and aspectual modification............... 145 3.2.2.3 Raising-to-subject and clause extraposition .................. 149 3.2.2.4 Raising-to-object................................................. 152 3.2.3 Ψ-idioms and coordination........................................... 154 3.3 Implications of the post-syntactic analysis ................................ 157 3.3.1 Transitivity alternations ............................................... 165 3.3.2 Nominalizations of ψ-expressions................................... 169 3.4 Conclusions................................................................... 177 4 From Roots to Words: Selection and Projection 183 4.1 A history of Palauan me- intransitives...................................... 188 4.2 Evidence for a subclass of passive me- verbs.............................. 190 4.2.1 The elusive by-phrase.................................................. 192 4.2.2 Licensing agent-oriented adverbials................................. 194 4.2.3 Control into purpose infinitival clause modifiers.................. 196 4.3 A diagnostic for unaccusative me- verbs................................... 199 4.3.1 Palauan di ngii-predication............................................ 200 4.3.2 Distinguishing unaccusatives from passives ........................ 205 4.3.3 Testing a prediction.................................................... 207 4.4 Notes on stative me- adjectives ............................................. 208 4.5 Analysis........................................................................ 211 v 4.6 Predictions and implications ............................................... 214 5 Resultatives and Word-Internal Syntax 222 5.1 Evidence for internal verbal structure ..................................... 225 5.1.1 Internalized external arguments ..................................... 225 5.1.2 The complex event structure of resultatives ........................ 228 5.1.2.1 Manner adverbials............................................... 228 5.1.2.2 Aspectual modifiers targeting telic endpoints................ 229 5.2 Resultatives as resulting state predicates .................................. 231 5.2.1 Truth conditions of resultatives ...................................... 232 5.2.2 Auxiliary selection: mla................................................ 233 5.2.3 Resultatives have stative past tense morphology................... 237 5.3 Argument structure of resultatives ......................................... 239 5.4 Syntactic analysis of Palauan resultatives .................................. 241 5.5 Consequences of the analysis............................................... 243 5.6 Conclusion.................................................................... 251 6 Overall Conclusions 252 References 257 vi A Au Pu V C Justin Nuger This dissertation addresses two fundamental, difficult questions in linguistic the- ory. The morphological question involves the formal status of verbs as “words,” while the syntactic question is concerned with how verb phrases are constructed. Both questions arise in frameworks, including Distributed Morphology and recent versions of Minimalism, in which the material that constitutes a verb is distribu- ted over multiple syntactic heads. To address these questions, I develop a theory of the verbal complex of Palauan, an Austronesian language spoken by approxi- mately 15,000 people in the Republic of Palau and elsewhere. The data covers new empirical domains and is drawn both from my original fieldwork and from sources of naturally occurring data. I begin by exploring the nature of grammatical relations in Palauan (subjects, direct objects, and possessors), concluding that they are instantiated by the opera- tion Agree. The morphosyntax of accusative DPs also suggests that licensing heads that trigger Agree may have other features bundled with them, like tense, aspect, or mood. Next, Palauan phrasal idioms reveal a locality restriction on their subparts for which I propose a constraint that refers to linearized strings. If the analysis is correct, Palauan idioms provide a new type of evidence for a post-syntactic compo- nent of the grammar. Then, from one morphologically uniform class of intransitive verbs and adjectives, I conclude that there are three distinct syntactic subclasses — passive verbs, unaccusative verbs, and stative adjectives. The result bears on the na- ture of the relations between functional heads and their complements, which I take to be something like feature-unification (rather than category-selection). Finally, the internal structure of resultative adjective phrases suggests that Palauan words are derived (at least partially) syntactically, where a syntactic head can merge with a phrasal XP but form a morphophonological word with just a proper subpart of that XP. The overall picture that emerges is that while the (morpho)syntax of Palauan appears initially baroque, it is not tremendously different from that of other lan- guages. Still, its sometimes unusual properties can help shed light on long-standing questions about similar phenomena in better-studied languages. A “Celui qui ne meurt pas une fois par jour ignore la vie.” Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915) Don’t get me wrong — I have every confidence that it’s an impossible task to thank everyone who has helped me get to where I am now. Having now read my fair share of other people’s dissertations, it occurs to me that the acknowledgments section ordinarily follows one of two models: (i) B >> Eu (keep it brief, thank the committee/family/close friends, and apologize for not thanking everyone else); or (ii) Eu >> B (try to thank as many people as possible while still attempting