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Malagasy extraposition

Evidence for PF movement

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Abstract

Extraposition is the non-canonical placement of dependents in a right-peripheral position in a clause. The Austronesian language Malagasy has basic VOXS word order, however, extraposition leads to VOSX. Extraposed constituents behave syntactically as though they were in their undisplaced position inside the predicate at both LF and Spell Out. This paper argues that extraposition is achieved via movement at Phonological Form (PF). I argue against alternatives that would derive extraposition with syntactic A’ movement or stranding analyses. Within a Minimalist model of grammar, movement operations take place on the branch from Spell Out to PF and have only phonological consequences.

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Notes

  1. I adopt the Y-model for ease of exposition, as it provides a clear visualization of what PF movement might be and when it occurs (see Sect. 6 for further discussion). In a Single Output Syntax model (Bobaljik 2002, others), PF and LF are identical and constitute the single endpoint of the syntactic derivation. I believe that what I conclude below could be implemented in this architecture as well.

  2. The predicate fronting operation is not well understood but it appears to have properties different from VP/Predicate Fronting in English. The latter is known to affect scope relations by restricting the scope of VP-internal elements (Huang 1993; Sauerland and Elbourne 2002). Malagasy predicate fronting does not have such an effect, perhaps because it is obligatory (but see Pearson 2017 for an apparent case where predicate fronting does not take place). I will assume that predicate fronting is “undone” at LF and that PredP reconstructs to its base position (Massam 2000; Potsdam 2007; Cole and Hermon 2008).

  3. It is difficult to show that a CP containing an NPI can extrapose as my consultants disliked cross-clausal NPI licensing configurations. Two consultants accepted an NPI in the complement of a Neg Raising verb, (i). In such a case, extraposition is still possible and required because the complement is a CP.

    1. (i)
      figure s

  4. An additional argument for total reconstruction is available based on scope, an argument also developed in Büring and Hartmann (1997) and de Vries (2002) for German and Dutch, respectively. The observation is that quantificational phrases show the same scope options whether they are in their base position or extraposed position. This fact follows easily from total reconstruction but is not compatible with an extraposed position LF. Space considerations prevent me from presenting the details.

  5. Linebarger (1980) gives examples of NPIs that are not licensed at Surface Structure, but that seem to require reconstruction to be licensed, such as (i).

    1. (i)

      [A doctor who knew anything about acupuncture] was not available. (Linebarger 1980:227)

    An anonymous reviewer suggests that such examples are different from the ungrammatical cases above because the bracketed noun phrase containing the NPI can independently reconstruct for scope reasons, to take scope under negation. S/he proposes that NPIs are licensed at LF but can only reconstruct for a non-NPI-related reason. Such an account can extend to the Malagasy data because Sect. 3 demonstrated that EXPs must reconstruct and the movement analysis stipulates this. The Malagasy case is different however in that there is no observable reason, such as scope, for the reconstruction. I leave this alternative available for future investigation. It might weaken the argument against movement based on NPIs.

  6. One might wonder why a combination of scattered deletion and atomization of the predicate cannot save this derivation. Sheehan (2010:231) indicates that both atomization and scattered deletion are last resort operations. Either can apply in the course of a derivation but applying them both in a single derivation, as would be required to get (68) to converge, is avoided.

  7. An anonymous reviewer suggests that the verb could undergo head movement to the higher auxiliary head, forming a single complex head which would then be linearizable. I am not able to easily rule out this possibility; however, there is no evidence that I am aware of that the verb and the auxiliaries form a unit. The observation that some auxiliaries can be separated from the verb by ellipsis suggests that they do not.

  8. A reviewer asks whether a different scattered deletion analysis might yet work for Malagasy extraposition. I am not aware of an existing one; however, I cannot rule this out should future research lead to a different understanding of clause structure, movement, and scattered deletion.

  9. These movements should be distinguished from genuine syntactic movement that is nonetheless phonologically motivated. Göbbel (2007) cites movement of contrastive topics in German to avoid a stress clash (Féry 2007) as an example. A second example is fronting of finite clauses in Malayalam (Aravind 2018). See also Zubizarreta’s (1998) p(rosodically motivated)-movement, which is syntactic because it feeds LF. A final option is that PF movement does not exist; Bošković and Nunes (2007) suggest that PF movement should be eliminated from the grammar.

  10. (75 A2) is marked as infelicitous (#) in Potsdam and Edmiston 2016:(13), but this seems too strong.

  11. I assume that F∘ and T∘ are phonologically null. Consequently, they do not appear in the prosodic structure. Given this, the phonological phrase corresponding to TP (\(\varphi _{\mathrm{TP}}\)) is not shown as it will expand directly to the subject phonological phrase (\(\varphi _{\mathrm{subj}}\)).

  12. Two reviewers question the use of Non-Recursivity as a holdout from earlier theories of prosodic structure in which recursion was not allowed at all (e.g. theories adopting Selkirk’s 1981 Strict Layer Hypothesis) in contrast to more recent theories (e.g. Selkirk 2011) in which prosodic recursion is not penalized at all. I take the middle ground, along with Selkirk (1996); Féry (2011, 2015), and others, in allowing prosodic recursion but recognizing that it makes a prosodic representation less optimal. What is important for my purposes is that there is some penalty for doing PF Adjunction, which Non-Recursivity achieves. Other constraints that will yield this result are possible. For example, Göbbel (2013:407) penalizes the additional structure with a faithfulness constraint, FaithS, which requires that the input prosodic structure not be modified. Truckenbrodt (1999), Féry and Samek-Lodovici (2006), Féry (2007, 2011), and an anonomyous reviewer propose constraints against the existence of prosodic categories, i.e. *φ and *ι. Such constraints would penalize recursive structure built with PF Adjunction. At this stage of the analysis, I am not able to decide between these options.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my Malagasy consultants Bodo and Voara Randrianasolo and Vololona Rafoloson, as well as audiences at the University of California, Berkeley, the 90th Meeting of the LSA, North East Linguistic Society 47, and the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association 23. I also thank Dan Edmiston who contributed greatly to early stages of this project. I am very grateful to three anonymous reviewers who helped to make this a better paper.

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Potsdam, E. Malagasy extraposition. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 40, 195–237 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-021-09505-2

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