TY - JOUR
T1 - The syntax of OVS word order in Hixkaryana
AU - Kalin, Laura
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements Above all, I would like to thank Anoop Mahajan and Carson Schütze, who read countless drafts of this paper as it developed from my Master’s Thesis into its current form, and whose comments have improved the paper immeasurably. This paper has also benefited from extensive discussions with Byron Ahn, Hilda Koopman, and Craig Sailor, feedback from the UCLA Syntax/Semantics Seminar and audiences at WCCFL 29, and incredibly insightful comments from Maria Polinsky and two anonymous NLLT reviewers. Finally, without Desmond C. Derbyshire’s precise and extensive fieldwork on Hixkaryana, this paper would not have been possible. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation through a Graduate Research Fellowship. All errors that remain are my own.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
PY - 2014/11/11
Y1 - 2014/11/11
N2 - In this paper I propose and motivate a novel syntactic analysis of Hixkaryana, a Carib language spoken in the Amazon in Brazil (Derbyshire 1977, 1979, 1985, i.a.). Hixkaryana displays basic/unmarked Object Verb Subject (OVS) word order, which is found in very few languages of the world (Dryer 2008). I argue that the syntax of Hixkaryana involves (i) head-finality in the A domain, but head-initiality in the A′ domain, and (ii) raising of vP into the A′ domain. My analysis accounts for a constellation of properties in Hixkaryana, including the surface order of constituents (OVS), surface constituency (the object and verb form a constituent that excludes the subject), agreement (prefixal portmanteau morphology marking the person of both the subject and the object), and the position of clause-level particles (which are in syntactic second position except for invariantly post-verbal ha).
AB - In this paper I propose and motivate a novel syntactic analysis of Hixkaryana, a Carib language spoken in the Amazon in Brazil (Derbyshire 1977, 1979, 1985, i.a.). Hixkaryana displays basic/unmarked Object Verb Subject (OVS) word order, which is found in very few languages of the world (Dryer 2008). I argue that the syntax of Hixkaryana involves (i) head-finality in the A domain, but head-initiality in the A′ domain, and (ii) raising of vP into the A′ domain. My analysis accounts for a constellation of properties in Hixkaryana, including the surface order of constituents (OVS), surface constituency (the object and verb form a constituent that excludes the subject), agreement (prefixal portmanteau morphology marking the person of both the subject and the object), and the position of clause-level particles (which are in syntactic second position except for invariantly post-verbal ha).
KW - Agreement
KW - Carib
KW - OVS word order
KW - Syntactic theory
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U2 - 10.1007/s11049-014-9244-x
DO - 10.1007/s11049-014-9244-x
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84912099594
SN - 0167-806X
VL - 32
SP - 1089
EP - 1104
JO - Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
JF - Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
IS - 4
ER -