Samoan predicate initial word order and object positions

(In)variability in the Samoan syntax/prosody interface and consequences for syntactic parsing

“…The sentences in (1) exemplify properties of this kind of case-system (see Deal, 2015 for an overview of ergativity): The subject of a transitive clause, e.g., le malini 'the marine' in (1a), is marked with a distinct case-the 'ergative.' The subject of an intransitive clause, e.g., le malini in (1b), and the object of a transitive clause, e.g., le mamanu 'the design' in (1a), both appear unmarked and receive 'absolutive' case (Chung, 1978, p. 54-56;Ochs, 1982, p. 649), though as we will discuss below, an alternative analysis is offered by Collins (2016Collins ( , 2014, following Legate (2008). Samoan primarily has VSO word order in transitive clauses, as exemplified in (1a), which also shows that the transitive subject is marked by the ergative case marker e. The intransitive clause (1b) demonstrates that the prepositional element [i] is a marker of oblique case.…”

“…To define the syntax/prosody interface, we tentatively adopt the analysis that has been proposed by Collins (2016Collins ( , 2015Collins ( , 2014. While Massam (2001) and others have assumed that Samoan has absolutive case marking, Collins (2014) argues that Samoan is actually a language of the type Legate (2008) classifies as 'ABS = DEF,' that is, a language where the marking that has been called 'absolutive' is actually the default case marking for nominative and accusative.…”

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

“…By way of transition to the syntax–prosody component of the proposal, I will briefly discuss the relationship between syntactic and prosodic words, because the X 0 ‐raising analysis presented in this section results in highly complex syntactic words. One line of thought maintains that a complex X 0 is so reliably produced as a single prosodic word ( ω ) that this type of prosodic constituency can be used as a litmus test for X 0 raising (see Collins for a recent example). In contrast, I take the perspective that a one‐to‐one mapping of X 0 to ω , as in (37a), is common but that one‐to‐many and many‐to‐one mappings also occur, as in (37b) and (37c).…”

Tonal marking of absolutive case in Samoan

“…What isn't under discussion is the implicit claim that tone can mark case: tonal morphemes are not uncommon in natural language and can signal morphosyntactic relationships such as tense/aspect, gender, number, and case (Hyman 2011b). In particular, tonal case markers have been reported to occur in Somali (Saeed 1993:148), 1 I use 'absolutive' in this paper as a descriptive gloss of what Collins (2014Collins ( , 2016 recognizes as the default, syncretic marking of nominative NOM and accusative ACC. 2 The following abbreviations are used in examples in this paper: ABS absolutive; Adv adverb; Agt agent; CONJ conjunction; COORD coordination; DET determiner; DIR directional particle; DU dual; DISJ disjunction; ERG ergative; EXC exclusive; GEN genitive; GENR general; H abs absolutive high edge tone; H coord coordination high edge tone; H front fronted expression high edge tone; H high edge tone; INA verbal suffix -a/ina; NEG negation; NSPEC nonspecific; O object; OBJ object; OBL oblique; PERF perfective; PNI pseudo noun incorporation; PRES present; S subject; SG singular; SPEC specific; TAM tense-aspect marker; TOP topic marker; V verb.…”

“…This paper shows that in the ergative-marking, purportedly non-tonal language Samoan, high edge tones reliably co-occur with absolutive arguments, 1 which have previously been thought to be unmarked (Chung 1978:54-56;Ochs 1982:649;Collins 2014:94). To illustrate: consider (1) from Collins's (2016) paper providing a VP-fronting account of verb-initiality in Samoan. My empirical claim entails that a high edge tone (annotated as H abs ) reliably appears preceding the object in a basic VSO transitive clause, e.g., preceding [le maile ula] 'the mischievous dog' in (1a).…”