Clitics and Agreement
, T. Roberts 2000
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