Distributed exponence: The Construction of Remote Tense Phrases

This dissertation examines the morphological and syntactic structures of the verb phrase in two Papuan languages of the Kiwaian family, Island Kiwai and Urama. It is focused on remote tenses, a phenomenon found in both languages. Remote tenses involve locating events within subdivisions of the past and future and typically involve periods of time such as today, yesterday or any time before yesterday. One aim of the study is to show how remoteness is not only semantically but also syntactically distinct from tense (Cable 2013). The concept of remoteness links Event Time with Utterance Time, whereas tense links Topic or Reference Time with Utterance Time in the classical system proposed by Reichenbach (1947). Using elicitations from a native speaker of Urama, I show how this language utilizes affixes, free morphs and agreement morphology to express remoteness in its TAM system. For Island Kiwai there is only one detailed source, Ray (1931). This language employs affixes and agreement morphology in its verb phrases, and also syntactic movement. In the non-future tenses tense and agreement are suffixed to the verb. But in future graded tenses the tense-agreement complex is prefixed to the verb. I conclude that excorporation is a potential explanation. Despite the differences in the functional morphology, distributed apparently randomly across the verb phrase in both languages, I aim to show there is a single underlying syntactic structure. This is achieved using the concepts developed in Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993). Syntax first builds the clause and its featural nodes, which vocabulary items with the best matching features then fill. Relatively few language-specific post-syntactic operations or stipulations are required to make up for underspecified morphology. I conclude the Urama Remoteness Phrase responds not only to Utterance Time, but also to the value of Tense, thus contributing to the variety of the morphs used to encode remoteness. In Island Kiwai, the same remoteness morphs appear on either side of the Present Tense, forming a mirror image. I claim that such mirroring can be explained if remoteness is only sensitive to Utterance Time.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor dc:publisher

ResearchSpace@Auckland

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Muir, Alex

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Brown, Jason
• Syed, Saurov

Statement dc:rights

• Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2292/65089

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchspace.auckland.ac.nz:2292/65089