Clause Structure and Argument Realization in Tongan: Evidence from Clitics
(Dissertation Proposal Talk)

Work on verb-initial languages often assumes that these languages have numerous covert configurational categories that help license the order of constituents and the arguments within the clause. As a part of a larger project investigating these phenomena in one such language, Tongan, in this talk, I look at the relevant issues in the upper part of the Tongan clause.

I argue that the upper part of the Tongan clause, unlike the lower part, does not have a flat structure. Instead, the clause-initial auxiliary should be treated as separate from and commanding the constituent that includes the main predicator and all its arguments. Not to do so would lose important generalizations regarding c-selection and coordination, as well as encounter complications from the behavior of "clitics."

On this analysis, however, "clitics" are not realized local to their semantic head, the main predicator of the clause. How, then, are they related to this head? I propose an HPSG analysis that treats the "clitics" as an instance of copy raising: the "clitics" are syntactic arguments of the clause-initial auxiliary, but semantically linked to an argument position of the lower predicate. Unlike previous analyses using clitic movement (Otsuka 2000, Custis 2004), my analysis is fully compatible with the morphophonological and morphosyntactic evidence for treating the "clitics" as affixes. My analysis also offers a straightforward account of instances with and without a coreferential independent pronoun doubling the "clitic." Furthermore, this account can be straightforwardly extended to a construction (the double ka construction, first noted by Dukes 2001) where the relationship between the clitic and its semantic head is even less local.

From this investigation, I argue that the Tongan clause involves far less structure than previously thought; instead, the Tongan facts can be accounted for simply using interactions between lexical items and their dependents.

REFERENCES

Custis, Tonya. 2004. Word Order Variation in Tongan: A Syntactic Analysis. Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota.

Dukes, Michael. 2001. The Morphosyntax of 2P Pronouns in Tongan.In Proceedings of HPSG-2000 Conference, edited by Dan Flickinger and Andreas Kathol, 63-80. CSLI Publications. http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/HPSG/1/.

Otsuka, Yuko. 2000. Ergativity in Tongan. Ph.D. diss., Oxford University.