Abstract
Pronominal paradigms in Philippine-type Austronesian languages show a robust and curious gap: in transitive clauses, pivot arguments and nonpivot agents may have bound pronominal forms, appearing as second-position clitics, but pronominal nonpivot themes must be full, free pronouns. This gap is instructive regarding the orga-nization of the lower phase edge. As cliticization involves a syntactic dependency between the host and argument position and all syntactic dependencies are constrained by phases, the gap is explained if pivots and nonpivot agents are specifiers of the phase head, making them the only DPs accessible for operations from outside of the lower phase.
Highlights
Since the identification of a cyclic boundary that separates a lower, thematic domain—often called the vP phase (Chomsky 2000, 2001; see Chomsky 1986)—from a higher domain of the clause, more recent investigations have sought to articulate the fine structure of this lower phase edge (e.g., Pylkkanen 2008, Travis 2010, Legate 2014, Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou, and Schafer 2015, Harley 2017)
Two views have been proposed in previous literature: (a) the external argument is generated as the specifier of the phase head, with any movements to the phase edge landing in another specifier position (e.g., Chomsky 2000, 2001, Nissenbaum 2000, Legate 2003, 2014, Aldridge 2004, 2008, Rackowski and Richards 2005) and (b) the external argument is generated in a projection below the phase head
If a full DP is targeted for movement to the specifier of Aux/T but it cannot be reduced to a D head to feed M-Merger, we propose that the entire higher copy must be deleted at PF, resulting in the appearance of no clitic doubling at all
Summary
Since the identification of a cyclic boundary that separates a lower, thematic domain—often called the vP phase (Chomsky 2000, 2001; see Chomsky 1986)—from a higher domain of the clause, more recent investigations have sought to articulate the fine structure of this lower phase edge (e.g., Pylkkanen 2008, Travis 2010, Legate 2014, Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou, and Schafer 2015, Harley 2017). In transitive clauses many Philippine-type Austronesian languages have two second-position clitic pronoun series, corresponding to “pivot” arguments and “nonpivot” agents; bound pronominal forms for nonpivot theme/patient arguments in such clauses are curiously absent. This fact is common to a wide range of Austronesian languages and has been hypothesized for reconstructions of Proto-Austronesian. Under the organization of the phase edge as in (1a), to be elaborated, the pivot argument and nonpivot agent are precisely the only two types of DPs that are accessible for syntactic operations from outside of the lower phase.
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