Clitics and agreement

A phrase structure is developed for Pashto, the most important Indo-Iranian language for which this task remains to be undertaken. New data show that the placement, ordering, and interpretation of second-position clitics may be derived in the syntax by treating the clitics as agreement heads that identify null arguments in their specifiers. In contrast to previous accounts, the need for phonological operations is drastically reduced, being restricted to sentences containing only a verb (in which prosodic inversion applies as a last resort). In the course of investigating the role of clitics with respect to argument structure and syntactic derivation, several novel phenomena are uncovered that do not exist in better studied languages. Some of the features scrutinized include compound verbs, agreement, aspect, ergativity, word order (scrambling), possessor raising and dislocation, ambiguity, relative clauses, and overt vs. covert movement.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2000

Author dc:creator

• Roberts, Taylor, 1967-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Shigeru Miyagawa.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/8964
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/8964

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8964