Speaker: Lisa Travis (McGill University)
Time: Friday, March 6th, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141
The Malagasy cleft: what and why
There are two goals of this talk. One is to discuss the particular characteristics of a certain construction in Malagasy that is used both for focus and for wh-questions. The second goal is to investigate the different ways one can go about creating an analysis for a construction that, on the surface, can look similar to an English construction but in a language that is otherwise quite different from English. Malagasy has a construction, sometimes called a no-[nu]-construction, named for the no particle that it contains. It has the following format where the pre-no material encodes new information.
Rasoa no mividy ny vary
Rasoa no pres.at.buy det rice
‘It is Rasoa who buys the rice.’Many papers have been written on the Malagasy no construction since Keenan’s (1976) seminal paper (e.g. Law 2005, Paul 2001, Pearson 2006, Potsdam 2004), but the exact nature of the construction is still being debated. Much of the controversy has centred around three issues.
(i) the nature of the [no XP] (clause or DP?),
(ii) the nature of no (Det, Focus head, or Comp?), and
(iii) the relation between the pre-no constituent and the following material (movement, predication, or something else?).In this talk I revisit these issues and bring new data into the discussion arguing in the end that (i) the [no XP] is nominal, (ii) no is in Det, and (iii) the pre-no constituent has not moved from the [no XP].
While the details of the analysis are partly driven by the data, they are also partly driven by the inherent nature of Malagasy within a language typology delineated by a movement typology. I have argued elsewhere (Travis 2005, 2006) that languages differ as to whether a feature triggers XP or X0 movement. In a language like English (or Italian), a V feature triggers X0 movement while a D feature triggers XP movement, and in a language like Malagasy, the reverse is true (there is VP and D0 movement). Given that Malagasy differs fundamentally from English, we might expect that a surface similar construction would have a fundamentally different analysis.
References
Keenan, Edward L. 1976. Remarkable Subjects in Malagasy. In Subject and Topic, ed. Charles Li, 249-301. New York: Academic Press.
Law, Paul. 2005. Questions and clefts in Malagasy. In Proceedings of Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, eds. Jeffrey Heinz and Dimitris Ntelitheos, 195-209. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics.
Paul, Ileana. 2001. Concealed pseudo-clefts. Lingua 111:707-727.
Pearson, Matt. 2006. What’s No? Clause linking in Malagasy. San Diego: Workshop on Comparative Austronesian Syntax.
Potsdam, Eric. 2004. Wh-questions in Malagasy. In Proceedings of the 11th Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association ed. Paul Law, 244-258. ZAS Working Papers in Linguistics.
Travis, Lisa deMena. 2005. VP, D0 movement languages. In Negation, Tense and Clausal Architecture: Cross-linguistic Investigations, eds. Raffaella Zanuttini, Héctor Campos, Elena Herburger and Paul Portner. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Travis, Lisa deMena. 2006. Voice Morphology in Malagasy as Clitic Left Dislocation or Malagasy in Wonderland: through the looking glass. In Clause structure and adjuncts in Austronesian languages, eds. Hans-Martin Gärtner, Paul Law and Joachim Sabel, 281-318. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.