Clitics and Agreement

T. Roberts, 2000

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A phrase structure is developed for Pashto, the most important Indo-Iranian language for which this task remains to be undertaken.  New data show that the placement, ordering, and interpretation of second-position clitics may be derived in the syntax by treating the clitics as agreement heads that identify null arguments in their specifiers.  In contrast to previous accounts, the need for phonological operations is drastically reduced, being restricted to sentences containing only a verb (in which prosodic inversion applies as a last resort).  In the course of investigating the role of clitics with respect to argument structure and syntactic derivation, several novel phenomena are uncovered that do not exist in better studied languages.  Some of the features scrutinized include compound verbs, agreement, aspect, ergativity, word order (scrambling), possessor raising and dislocation, ambiguity, relative clauses, and overt vs. covert movement.

Thesis supervisor:         Shigeru Miyagawa

Title:                             Professor of Linguistics and Japanese

Table of Contents

1          Introduction                                                                                                      8

            1.1       Data                                                                                                     8

            1.2       Phonology and orthography                                                                  9

            1.3       Word order                                                                                          11

            1.4       Nominal morphology and case                                                  17

            1.5       Verbal morphology and agreement                                                        24

                        1.5.1    Simple verbs                                                                             24

                        1.5.2    Auxiliaries                                                                                 29

            1.6       Outline                                                                                                 31

2          Complex verbs                                                                                     33

            2.1       Aspect-driven asymmetries                                                                   33

            2.2       Merger and clitic placement                                                                  35

            2.3       Split agreement                                                                         39

            2.4       Explaining the asymmetries                                                                    47

                        2.4.1    Argument structure                                                                   47

                        2.4.2    Perfective as a strong feature                                                     50

            2.5       Split headedness                                                                                   54

3          Deriving second position                                                                                   64

            3.1       Introduction                                                                                          64

            3.2       Overview of clitics and their placement                                      68

            3.3       Previous analyses                                                                                  72

            3.4       Clitics as agreement                                                                              77

                        3.4.1    Deriving the second position effect                                            78

                        3.4.2    Scrambling                                                                               83

                                    3.4.2.1 EPP and focus as triggers                                              83

                                    3.4.2.2 Last resort                                                                    88

                        3.4.3    Distribution with verbal agreement suffixes                                 96

                        3.4.4    Coordination                                                                            103

                        3.4.5    Doubling                                                                                   105

            3.5       Possessive clitic dislocation                                                                   110

                        3.5.1    More evidence for clitics as agreement                          112

                        3.5.2    External possession in other languages                           121

                                    3.5.2.1 Possessive dative constructions                         122

                                    3.5.2.2 Other possessive alternations                                        129

                        3.5.3    Covert dislocation                                                                     133

                        3.5.4    Locality of interpretation                                                           144

            3.6       Relative clauses                                                                                    152

                        3.6.1    Gapping asymmetries                                                                152

                        3.6.2    Resumption and dislocation                                                       162

4          Ordering within the cluster                                                                                 179

            4.1       Deriving the template                                                                            179

            4.2       Pronominals                                                                                          180

            4.3       Modals                                                                                     184

            4.4       Adverbials                                                                                            188

            4.5       Morphophonological aspects of clitic ordering                           192

                        4.5.1    Prosodic inversion                                                                    192

                        4.5.2    Vowel coalescence                                                                   206

                        4.5.3    Remaining issues of clitic ordering                                              208