Unlocking the verbal spine in Malayalam: Past tense is key

Abstract

The focus of the paper is the internal structure of the verbal spine. Our aim is to show, using data from Malayalam, how verbal structures can be built, allowing for a new understanding of verb alternations as well as the verbal spine. The paper provides a novel analysis of the various v/Voice features, and proposes the adjunction of a √AGENT to the functional heads v and Voice. The difference in the loci of adjunction of the √AGENT is shown to be directly correlated with the differences in the semantics of the verb with consequences for the argument structure, specifically, the external argument at Spec, VoiceP. This analysis not only unpacks the verbal spine to help build a uniform account of verb alternations, but also provides for a clear understanding of the complex past tense morphology in the language. The contextually driven allomorphy of the past tense is shown to be directly linked to the morphosyntactic features and the expression of the exponents at v/Voice. The paper also proposes that the feature specifications on the verbal spine are becoming synchronically opaque for a variety of reasons, and are often only indirectly recoverable via the past tense morphology.