Clause Structure and Adjuncts in Austronesian Languages: A Critical Introductory Survey

Abstract

Syntactic analyses of Austronesian languages have predominantly been concerned with three phenomena. First, and perhaps most widely known, there is the controversy about how to view Philippine-type voice systems. These are typically symmetrical in the sense that what resembles passivization does not lead to demotion, i.e. oblique status of one of the arguments involved. This symmetry is closely related to the difficulty of determining the grammatical function of "subject." Thus, although voice morphology correlates with (the semantic role of) a single designated argument , which we will call "trigger" (argument) henceforth, standard subject properties are distributed between this trigger and an actor argument when the two do not coincide. Secondly, Austronesian languages tend to have head initial word order, which often results in verb initial or predicate initial clause structure. Thirdly, there exists a condition on unbounded dependencies for arguments, disallowing extraction of anything other than the trigger. While questions surrounding these issues are clearly far from settled, the volume we are presenting and discussing here is intended to shift perspectives and reflect on the status of adjuncts in Austronesian languages as well as the repercussions this has on analyzing Austronesian clause structure. The most obvious motivation for this shift is that much less is known about adjuncts in Austronesian languages. Secondly, studying the syntax of adjuncts in other languages has regularly been a catalyst in developing more fine-grained theories of phrase structure and locality. Thirdly, recent controversies about the nature of adverb placement, i.e. whether or not it is governed by a universal hierarchy of functional projections, has made a survey of less well documented language types such as Austronesian languages more urgent, not the least because an initial study of Malagasy adverb order indicated an interesting kind of confirmation of the formalist / universalist hypothesis. We will now proceed as follows. Section 1 provides a rough sketch of the three "big questions" of Austronesian syntax mentioned above. Section 2 will then be devoted to adjuncts and briefly document some of the most

Verb‐Initial Word Orders, Primarily in Austronesian and Mayan Languages

“…The essence of this restriction is that in a given clause, only one argument (the external argument, or possibly the subject) is accessible to A'-movement; all other arguments are ineligible to A'-move (Keenan 1972;Gärtner et al 2006;Chung and Polinsky 2009). …”

Syntactic Ergativity

“…Therefore, it cannot be frozen due to Case-driven movement. Furthermore, EPP-driven movement can only motivate criterial freezing in a subset of ergative languages, since verb-initial languages do not satisfy the EPP via DP movement (Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 1998;Chung 2005;Gärtner, Law, and Sabel 2006). 16 All things considered, the ban on A -movement of the ergative has to follow from something other than criterial freezing.…”

Introduction

“…However, if this is the only evidence for VP islandhood, it is hard to rule out circularity of reasoning: Does the derivation of verbfirst word order account for the subjects-only restriction on extraction, or vice versa? Furthermore, it is possible that in some of these languages VP's are not islands more generally, for instance, if extraction of PP arguments (Sabbagh 2005;Cole and Hermon 2005), or of embedded adjuncts (Chung 2006;Gärtner et al 2006) is allowed. If so, a different explanation would have to be found for the fact that argument extraction is restricted to subjects.…”

“…Some recent attempts have been made to broaden the scope of investigation; for instance, by exploring patterns of adjunct extraction in Austronesian languages (see Gärtner et al 2006). Some Austronesian languages, such as Chamorro, Malagasy, and Indonesian, appear to allow adjuncts to extract freely, as long as the usual island constraints are obeyed; in other Austronesian languages, adjunct extraction appears to be severely restricted.…”

“…Our discussion will necessarily be brief; readers who would like more extensive discussion are invited to consult the detailed overview by Gärtner et al (2006).…”