Prosodic Noun Incorporation: The Relationship between Prosody and Argument Structure in Niuean

Abstract

This paper argues for a uniform X 0 -raising analysis of VSO and VOS word order in Niuean. Accounting for VSO via X 0 raising has a strong foundation in the V1 literature; the claim that X 0 raising can also underlie VOS word order-as in Niuean's pseudo-noun-incorporation construction-is more controversial. This paper explains the VOS order of Niuean pseudo noun incorporation by appealing to a condition on prosodic well-formedness, ARGUMENT-φ, that requires a head and its internal argument(s) to form a unique phonological phrase. In order to satisfy this requirement, the incorporated argument undergoes prosodic restructuring into a position adjacent to the verb at PF. Since the verb arrives at its clause-initial position via X 0 raising, the syntactic input to the prosodic grammar is VSO, while the prosodic output is VOS.

Building verbs in Chuj: Consequences for the nature of roots

“…I suggest here, following the proposal in Clemens (2014) for incorporation structures in Niuean, and Clemens & Coon (to appear) for Mayan, that the verb undergoes regular head movement to the position that hosts the status suffix above the subject, as in the unergatives above (see also Armstrong 2015 on Yucatec). The bare NP complement is reordered at PF, due to a high-ranked prosodic requirement that the structurally impoverished (D -less) object be phrased with the verb.…”

Licensing unergative objects in ergative languages: The view from Polynesian

“…In accord with Clemens 2019’s analysis of the Niuean counterpart oti (which we will discuss in section 5.1), we represent Samoan ‘uma as being generated in a dedicated $$$ \forall \mathrm{P} $$$ projection that is located, as shown in (22), above vP but below the projection to which the fronted VP eventually raises. This derives ‘uma 's surface postverbal position.…”

Vera Lee-Schoenfeld & Dennis Ott (eds.), Parameters of predicate fronting (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. vii + 225.

“…Clemens considers two approaches to this alternation: (i) VOS order is base-generated, with the subject occupying a right-specifier, while VSO is derived via object postposing. (ii) VOS and VSO are both derived by fronting: either VP raises over the subject to produce VOS order, with prior extraction of the object to derive VSO (Massam 2001); or V raises to produce VSO order, with VOS derived post-syntactically via PROSODIC RESTRUCTURING (Clemens 2019). Clemens provides acoustic data (intonation, segment duration, distribution of pauses) to show that in both languages the verb and object form a prosodic phrase in VOS clauses, while in VSO clauses the verb forms a prosodic phrase to the exclusion of both arguments.…”