Possessors move through the edge, too

Abstract

This paper discusses possessor sub-extraction in Indonesian, Javanese and Madurese, and its implications for phase-based A-bar extraction of nominals. I show that possessors may extract from their possessive DPs and occur at the left edge of the clause. I argue that the suffix that occurs on the possessum (Indonesian-nya, Javanese-ne, Madurese-Nah) is the pronunciation of the functional head D rather than a pronominal possessor or resumptive pronoun. While the extraction of verbal arguments has been well studied in Indonesian languages, possessor subextraction provides a novel set of data that contributes to the discussion on the relationship between voice and nominal extraction. In these languages, voice morphology on the verb must reflect extraction of a low nominal, whether a verbal argument or a possessor. This pattern shows that the functional head Voice regulates A-bar extraction of all nominals that begin in the complement of the verb: the extracted nominal undergoes successive-cyclic movement through the edge of DP, then the edge of VoiceP, before landing in its surface position in CP. This movement is marked by morphological wh-agreement in the nominal and verbal domain. Possessor extraction thus has implications for theories of nominal extraction, phases and clause structure in Indonesian-type languages.

Raising applicatives and possessors in Tagalog

“…This has prompted some scholars to liken the behaviour of the pivot in Philippine languages to object shift in Germanic (Richards 2000;Rackowski 2002;Rackowski & Richards 2005;Sabbagh 2016), where the pivot obligatorily moves to the outer edge of VoiceP and becomes the highest argument visible to C for overt or covert extraction. Common to both the object shift approach and the proposal sketched here is that it is essentially Voice which determines which argument is the pivot (see also Aldridge 2004;Jeoung 2018). In my approach, the pivot is identified by virtue of having undergone nominative Case assignment by Voice.…”

“…In Section 3.3, I present the argument structure restrictions on external possession, showing that it is limited to themes of externallycaused change of state verbs. This theme restriction on external possession is found in closely related Cebuano (Bell 1976;1983) but is absent in other Austronesian languages, such Malagasy (Keenan 1972;Keenan & Ralalaoherivony 2001), Chamorro (Chung 2008) and Indonesian (Davies 2008;Jeoung 2018). The data presented in this section comes from elicitation work with four native speaker consultants.…”

Korean Specificational Pseudoclefts as Caseless Focus Nominal Extraction*

“…The Indonesian sentence in (21a) is ambiguous – it can be analyzed as either a cleft sentence or a relative clause, even though they have the exactly the same structure (Jeoung 2018 and Aldridge 2008). When the Rumah Adi ‘Adi’s house’ functions as an external head of the relative clause, the relative CP does not convey any particular information structure.…”