Abstract
Ever since Kayne (1994) which argues that the universal word order in a phrase is Head-Complement, many studies had proliferated in support of the LCA. Basically, at the level of the clause, many languages exhibit the SVO pattern but there are languages which display distorted word order among which the SOV. The Awing language has both orders and there are determined on the basis of the opposition positive versus negative clause. This paper examines the derivation of the Awing SOV structure and argues that this derivation involves basic movements such head and A- movements (Chomsky 1995) in addition to remnant and heavy pied-ping. It also proposes a reanalysis of the landing site of the raised remnant VP and argues (in contradiction to Nyomy (2019) who posits that the position of the raised VP is spec, AgrOP) that the raised remnant VP lands in spec, TopP (an IP-internal left periphery position as posited by Jayaseelan (2001)).
Highlights
One of the purposes of linguistic analysis is to describe variation among languages and many studies in this domain try, with empirical corpus, to explain differences observed in clause constituents order
It proposes a reanalysis of the landing site of the raised remnant VP and argues (in contradiction to Nyomy (2019) who posits that the position of the raised VP is spec, AgrOP) that the raised remnant VP lands in spec, TopP (an IP-internal left periphery position as posited by Jayaseelan (2001))
Adopting the ExhP (Fominyam and Simik (2017)) over the EmpP (Fominyam (2012)) is not of greater change in our derivation of (40). In this analysis proposed in this paper, the structure of the negative clause in Awing shows challenges to the minimalist view proposed in Chomsky (1995) and subsequent works
Summary
One of the purposes of linguistic analysis is to describe variation among languages and many studies in this domain try, with empirical corpus, to explain differences observed in clause constituents order. The consequence of head-argument order for syntax is quiet motivating and my interest to studying such aspect of the syntax is fundamentally based on of the grammar Awing, a Grassfield Bantu language which exhibits the VO as well as OV pattern: VO is the basic word expressed in positive statements (1a) while the OV order is exhibited as in negative sentences (1b): 1. I will argue that the SOV pattern is the consequence of head-agreement and the derivation of any negative clause involves the projection of IP-internal topic and focus phrases which stand as intermediate loci for various fronted elements. It will establish the difference between raising and non-raising negation and posits that raised constituents occupy spec, TopP, in the IP-internal COMP-system.
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