On the Positional Distribution of an Armenian Auxiliary: Second‐Position Clisis, Focus, and Phases

Abstract

This paper investigates the positional distribution of an auxiliary clitic in Eastern Armenian in informationally marked sentences. The paper builds on previous work on the distribution of the auxiliary in focus-neutral contexts (Kahnemuyipour & Megerdoomian 2011), where its placement was analyzed as second position within the lower phase domain (or vP), thereby extending the inventory of known second-position phenomena from the clause to the smaller verbal domain. To account for the distribution of the auxiliary in sentences with focused constituents, it is proposed here that the relevant phase in this context is the Focus Phrase, with the auxiliary appearing in the expected second position. This falls into place under a dynamic view of phasehood that defines the phase as the highest projection of a lexical category and takes low focus to be part of the verbal domain and its corresponding phase (Bo skovi c 2014). These proposals rely highly on the parallelism between clausal and verbal domains both in terms of their status as phases as well as their structural makeup. To the extent that these proposals succeed in accounting for the facts we discuss, they provide further evidence for the dynamic conception of phases as well as the CP-vP parallelism.We would like to thank the participants of the following conferences: LSA 2008, Meeting Clitics 2008, and WCCFL 2010, as well as audiences at the University of Toronto, Michigan State University, and MIT for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. We are also grateful to three anonymous reviewers and the editors of Syntax for their constructive feedback.1 Armenian is an Indo-European language; the Eastern dialect is spoken in Armenia and Iran and in the diasporan communities originating from these two countries. Examples here represent the colloquial Iranian-Armenian dialect.2 In this paper, we use clefts to mark focus in the English translations for convenience. 3 The nominative marker in Armenian has two allomorph variants, the schwa and -n after vowels. According to Vaux (1998:170), this alternation results from the addition of -n, which triggers schwa epenthesis and then deletes when not followed by a vowel. 4 The following special abbreviations are used in the examples: LOC = locative, INST = instrumental, SP = specific object, NSP = nonspecific object, PRS = present tense, PST = past tense, AOR = aorist, PROG = progressive aspect, PFV = perfective aspect, CAUS = causative, REDUP = reduplication, PASS = passive, CL = classifier, and DO = Direct Object.

Non-canonical agreement in copular clauses

“…This is due to a special property of the Eastern Armenian copula (and auxiliary) which obligatorily cliticizes to focalized elements (Comrie 1984; Tamrazian 1994; Tragut 2009; Kahnemuyipour & Megerdoomian 2011, 2017). This confound is compounded by the fact that the pragmatic conditions under which (46b) and (47b) are felicitous are difficult to differentiate.…”

“…46 There is a potential confound in (46b) because it is string ambiguous with a predicational clause in which NP1 has been focalized as in (47b), which would be derived from the predicational clause in (47a). This is due to a special property of the Eastern Armenian copula (and auxiliary) which obligatorily cliticizes to focalized elements (Comrie 1984;Tamrazian 1994;Tragut 2009;Kahnemuyipour & Megerdoomian 2011, 2017. This confound is compounded by the fact that the pragmatic conditions under which (46b) and (47b) are felicitous are difficult to differentiate.…”

Anti-Pied-Piping

“…Nonetheless, as shown in 66 above, MSF may target either the subject or the object, with some speakers in fact preferring subject placement (see n. 16). See also Kahnemuyipour & Megerdoomian 2017 for explicit arguments against tying focus particle position to main stress in Eastern Armenian, although without discussion of anti-pied-piping.…”

Cleft constructions and focus strategies in Modern Armenian

“…La stratégie de focalisation préverbale de l'arménien oriental a donné lieu à plusieurs travaux (cf. Comrie 1984 ;Tamrazian 1991 ;Megerdoomian 2011 ;Kahnemuyipour & Megerdoomian 2017 ;Semenova 2014aSemenova , 2014b. En revanche, à notre connaissance, aucune recherche n'a été conduite sur les constructions clivées en arménien.…”