Instrumental aki and the Nature of Niuean Transitivity

Abstract

This paper examines the lexicosyntactic properties of the Niuean instrumental element aki. This particle can be used as a preposition or it can appear as a clitic within the sentence-initial verbal complex. The cliticization of aki has interesting consequences for transitivity that will be explored in this paper. It is shown that the previous claim (Seiter I980) that aki cannot attach to an intransitive verb is misleading. Rather, aki cannot attach to a semantically nonagentive verb, although the resulting clause may or may not contain an ergative NP, depending on whether or not the agent is syntactically expressed. The examination of aki leads us to conclude that the Niuean transitive clause, defined by the presence of an agentive external argument, is determined by the saturation of the VP. Another goal of this paper is to determine whether the clitic aki functions as an incorporated preposition (i.e., in conjunction with the verb as a case and thematic role assigner) or as some sort of anaphoric clitic, coreferential with an element in the discourse. This question arises because, in other Polynesian languages such as Tongan and Samoan, aki has been said to have an anaphoric use (Chapin I974, Clark I976, Hovdhaugen I985). Little has been said specifically about Niuean aki, though Chapin (I974) states that aki is not anaphoric in languages other than Tongan and Samoan, and Seiter (I98o) considers Niuean aki in all cases to be an incorporated preposition. Our conclusion in this paper is that, while in the most commonly cited examples aki has prepositional properties, in certain circumstances (i.e., when operator bound), it acts anaphorically, in that it needs an antecedent in the preceding clause. We show that in this use, Niuean aki, like aki in the languages discussed by Clark, Chapin, and Hovdhaugen, is similar to another verbal clitic, the locative or temporal ai that has been discussed by Chapin (I974) and by Massam and Roberge(I997).