Realis-Irrealis shifts in Chini clause chains

2018

This dissertation aims to contribute to our theoretical understanding and descriptive capacity concerning realis-irrealis distinctions, which I define in terms of a language-specific division of states of affairs into 'real' and 'imaginary'. In it I rely upon the nine months of fieldwork on Chini I had conducted by that point in time. Examples are all from my field notes or from the annotated documentary corpus of Chini narrative and conversation, which I built mainly with the help of my Chini teacher, my apakɨ and friend Barɨng’ɨnɨ Manaa (Anton). Taking into account the breadth of the literature on the topic including grammars of languages described as having realis-irrealis distinctions and/or realis or irrealis as lone categories, I focus the discussion on Chini spoken in inland Madang, Papua New Guinea, a language in which realis-irrealis distinctions are unusually elaborated, perhaps moreso than any other described language. This is because in Chini the distinction is marked not only in multiple parts of the verb morphology but also separately in the clause chain linkage enclitics. I show: (1) that temporal reference is not part of the emic meaning in realis-irrealis distinctions in Chini; (2) that there is an important relation between the area of the grammar where the distinction occurs and its particular division of the semantic-pragmatic space; and (3) that realis-irrealis distinctions are not quite identical to (and thus not necessarily comparable with) phenomena covered by 'realis', 'irrealis' and other similar labels whenever these involve (lone) categories. This is because they lack the critical dualism that characterizes the distinction, as it occurs in Chini and in the grammars of many other languages. In addition to these findings I present an overview of the history of scholarship on this topic over the last century, discuss various other components of the Chini workings and issues of cross-linguistic comparability, and describe relevant parts of Chini grammar and aspects of Chini culture.

Interclausal relations in Papuan languages and in particular their prototyical clause chaining structures have long presented serious descriptive problems. These have been analyzed variously as instances of subordination, coordination, and even a third unique type of relationship, cosubordination. This paper argues that clause chaining structures are actually a type of coordination, but distinguished from familiar types of coordination by the type of constituent coordinated, S versus IP. The parametric variation found in clause chaining constructions across Papuan languages is in turn accounted for in terms of the types of functional heads of verbal inflections, negation, mood, tense, illocutionary force, which head the individual IPs conjoined in clause chains. This paper presents a revision of the theory of clause linkage, in particular the theory of nexus, first developed in Foley and Van Valin (1984) and restated in Van Valin and La Polla (1997) and Van Valin (2005). The original theory proposed three categories of nexus, the traditional ones of subordination and coordination and a new type, cosubordination. Subordination and coordination were distinguished along the traditional lines of embedded versus non-embedded. For our purposes here, we will define an embedded clause as one which functions as a constituent, either core or oblique (Andrews 2007; Foley 2007), of another clause, the main or matrix clause. Conventionally, grammarians have called embedded subordinate clauses which function as core arguments complements, and those which function as oblique constituents, adverbial clauses, but in our view this is not the most perspicacious terminology because it obscures their overall similarity, a similarity clearly brought out in the structure of many Papuan languages. For that reason, in this paper we will refer to both types simply as subordinate clauses and note the level of embedding, core versus oblique. Clauses linked in a coordinate nexus are not in an asymmetrical relationship of embedded versus matrix clause, but rather are joined at the same level, strung along rather like beads on a string. Designating a clause by the exocentric category S (Bresnan 2001), we can represent the contrast between subordinate and coordinate nexus as Figure 1:

Clause-linking and clause hierarchy: syntax and pragmatics. pp. 269-311, 2010

This paper analyses clause-linking strategies in mostly Austronesian languages, with particular focus on the functions of informational and referential hierarchy strategies in the architecture of complex clauses. Informational (topic, focus) hierarchy and its markers, structure clauses as subordinate via the contrast between presupposition vs. assertion. Referential hierarchy and its markers (endophoric demonstratives and definite markers), are another subordinating strategy based on the contrast between already referential/backgrounded clause vs. asserted main clause. Paths of evolution leading from coordinators or from endophoric demonstratives to informational hierarchy markers and to subordinating conjunctions or constructions are more specifically discussed. It is argued that informational hierarchy and referential hierarchy strategies are inherent to the syntactic architecture of the complex clause.

Open Linguistics, 2021

Clause chaining is a form of syntactic dependency holding between a series of clauses, typically expressing temporal or causal relations between events. Prosodic hierarchy theory proposes that syntactic constituents are systematically mapped to prosodic constituents, but most versions of the theory do not account for clause chain syntax. This article presents original data from Matukar Panau, a clause-chaining Oceanic (Austronesian) language of Papua New Guinea. The clause chain is a syntactic constituent in which final-clause TAM scopes over preceding clauses. There are also other types of multi-clausal structures, encompassing subordinate adverbial clauses, and verbless copula clauses, and we analyse all these as instances of the "syntactic sentence." The syntactic sentence maps to a distinct prosodic domain, marked by the scaling of L% boundary tones, and we equate this domain with the "utterance phrase" posited in some versions of prosodic hierarchy theory. The prosodic characteristics of the Matukar Panau utterance phrase are similar to those found in non-chaining languages, but while other languages use this prosody to mark pragmatically related groups of clauses, in Matukar Panau it most commonly maps to a syntactic sentence.

Lingua, 2008

Although the neutral clauses of standard Indonesian are SVO, the language also permits verb-initial word order, and belongs to a branch of the Austronesian language family that was probably originally verb-initial. An analysis of Indonesian clause structure is investigated which exploits these connections, inspired by Cole and Hermon's analysis of the closely related language Toba Batak. In this analysis, VP must raise to the specifier of T and the subject can then raise to a specifier outside the clause proper. Such an analysis is shown to be inferior to an analysis of standard Indonesian in which SVO clauses are derived by simply raising the subject to the specifier of T. Evidence is presented that in some varieties of standard Indonesian, but not others, verb-initial clauses are derived by raising VP to an even higher specifier. Overall, the investigation serves to highlight some of the empirical considerations that can be brought to bear on 'abstract' analyses of clause structure. #

Despite the wealth of subordinators in Hiw and Lo Toga (Oceanic, north Vanuatu), two of their Tense Aspect Mood categories – the Subjunctive and the Background Perfect – can do without them, and encode clause dependency by themselves. A pragmatic hypothesis is proposed to account for this clause linking faculty. The Subjunctive differs from other irrealis categories insofar as it lacks any specific illocutionary force; the Background Perfect labels its predicate as informationally backgrounded. In both cases, the clause lacks certain key properties (illocutionary force; informational weight) which are normally required in pragmatically well formed utterances. This pragmatic demotion makes the clause dependent on external predications, which naturally results in syntactic subordination. This case study illustrates how syntax can be reshaped by the pragmatic parameters of discourse.

2022

This thesis examines the copulas ialah and adalah in Malay on different levels of linguistic analysis, in different periods in time, and against different genetically related languages. Addressing the scarcity of research on copular clauses in Malay in all three areas, namely synchrony, diachrony, and typology, this thesis aims to serve as a point of reference for future study on nonverbal predication in Malay and beyond. The synchronic portion of the thesis begins with a demonstration of the monomorphemic nature of the two copulas, which no longer exhibit the morphosyntax, semantics, and information structure of the morphemes that they appear to comprise, viz. 3rd person ia, existential verb ada, and focus marker lah. Following that, several syntactic and semantic phenomena, including extraction from copular clauses, copular inversion, and overt vs. zero encoding of the copula, are investigated. Lastly, the derivation of clefts in Malay is examined, which I reveal to be a type of copular construction despite the absence of an overt copula. I then show that the derivation of a cleft feeds the further derivation of a pseudocleft via remnant movement. In the history of Malay, ialah and adalah are shown to have emerged relatively recently, that is towards the end of the Classical Malay era, circa the 18th to 19th century. Ialah grammaticalised from the combination of 3rd person pronoun ia and comment marker lah in a topical construction that involved left dislocation. Specifically, the topic was reanalysed as the canonical subject, which subsequently forced the resumptive pronoun to undergo Spec-to-Head reanalysis, resulting in ialah grammaticalising into a copula heading TP. Meanwhile, adalah grammaticalised from semantically vacuous support auxiliary ada, also in combination with comment marker lah. Both copulas originally developed from the need to provide a host for the comment marker as a way of avoiding a violation of the stray affix filter. The typological survey of copular clauses in Austronesian reveals that syntactic alignment and word order play a central role in the emergence of copulas in a language. Of the 40 languages examined, all the 19 languages that have overt copulas are accusatively aligned, except the ergatively aligned Formosan language Puyuma, which entails that ergative-absolutive and split ergative languages within Austronesian are statistically very unlikely to have overt copulas. In addition to that, 20 of the 25 accusatively aligned languages have SVO word order, whilst all of the 9 ergatively aligned languages have VSO word order. The word order of the language is relevant as all but two of the 19 languages with overt copulas have SVO word order. In consideration of these findings, I argue that the correlation among the three factors is such that change from ergative to accusative alignment triggers change in word order from verb-initial order to verb-medial order, and that this is conducive to the emergence of overt copulas. Furthermore, word order plays a crucial role in the emergence of overt copulas as they may develop in topical constructions following reanalysis of the left-dislocated topic as the canonical subject, as argued in the diachronic portion of the thesis. Given this path of development, I argue that pronominal copulas have not been able to develop in the ergatively aligned Philippine-type languages due to the lack of the notion of subject and the absence of the canonical subject position, which prevents reanalysis of left-dislocated topics as canonical subjects and subsequently resumptive pronouns as copulas, as undergone by the Malay copula ialah. In addition to that, verbal copulas cannot develop from posture verbs in the Philippine-type languages because of the clash between the unergative nature of posture verbs and the unaccusative nature of the copula, which presents a problem in the Philippine-type languages due to the encoding of the agent argument on the verb in the actor voice. Besides, the strict intransitive nature of the copular clause is incompatible with other voice alternations such as the benefactive and the locative, as the trigger in these voice alternations is encoded as an applied argument, making the clause transitive. Verbs of becoming also cannot copularise in the Philippine-type languages via semantic bleaching of the inchoative aspect, due to the robust morphological marking of aspect on the verb.

Frontiers in Communication, 2020

How do children learn to understand and use complex syntactic constructions? In English, Diessel (2004) shows that they do so in two different ways. Complex sentences with dependent clauses (e.g., “Peter promised that he would come”) develop out of simple sentences that are gradually expanded into multi-clause ones. Complex sentences with coordinate clauses (e.g., “He tried hard, but he failed”) develop by integrating two independent sentences into a single two-clause unit. Here we expand on that research by focusing on the acquisition of a kind of complex syntactic structure which involves both dependency and coordination—the clause chain—in Ku Waru, a Papuan language spoken in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Clause chains are constructions coordinating multiple clauses in sequence, where the non-final or “medial” clauses are in a dependent relationship with the final clause. One function of clause chains, which is often taken to be the prototypical one, is to refer to a series of events in sequence. Some Ku Waru clause chains do refer to sequential events. Other Ku Waru clause chains containing particular verbs refer to single events, sometimes with the particular verb providing aspectual or adverbial qualification (“keep doing,” “do quickly,” etc.). In this article, we track the acquisition of several different kinds of clause chains based on longitudinal recordings of four children acquiring Ku Waru as their first language between the ages of 1½ and 5. We show that, although there are differences among the children in the ages at which they acquire the various kinds of clause chain, all four of them follow the same series of steps in doing so. In conclusion, we compare our findings to Diessel's for English. We find that they are similar in some ways and different in others, which may be related to the differences between subordinate constructions, coordinate non-dependent constructions and coordinate-dependent constructions. Introduction