Speaker: Ioannis Katochoritis (MIT)
Title: Micro-variation is a conspiracy: Condition C, Case and Wholesale Late Merge in Balinese vs. Malagasy
Time: Tuesday, October 21st, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: (joint work with Lena Lohninger)
This talk aims to illustrate the idea that microvariation is an epiphenomenonal conspiracy of the derivation. The focus will be two Malayo-Polynesian languages, Balinese and Malagasy, which share the Austronesian voice/pivot system: one (any) argument per clause is promoted to a syntactically and pragmatically salient status by becoming the so-called pivot.
When the internal argument becomes the pivot, the so-called Object Voice forms a non-canonical passive: the internal argument A-moves high to map into the surface subject, while the agent is not demoted to oblique, but remains a syntactically core argument that is licensed via strict right-adjacency to the verb.
However, the two languages differ with respect to Condition C: while Balinese pivot movement obligatorily reconstructs, and thus feeds connectivity, Malagasy pivot movement does not obligatorily reconstruct, and can thus bleed connectivity. To account for this apparent microparameter, we suggest that, while Malagasy allows Wholesale Late Merge (Takahashi & Hulsey 2009) of the pivot’s restrictor to the high landing site, Balinese does not.
We then provide two possible reasons for this: first, Balinese Object Voice still assigns accusative case to its internal argument, while Malagasy has lost this capacity, with the pivot being only licensed with nominative at the landing site; this forces pivots in the former, but not in the latter, to be early merged entirely at their base position. Evidence will come from asymmetries in multiple extraction, resumptive pronouns, quantifier scope and the inventory of Object Voice morphemes. Second, Balinese, but not Malagasy, exhibits DP-internal head movement to derive the suffixal nature of its determiner, which would be completely countercyclic under any tenable formulation of the Extension Condition.