Cover not available
Article published In:
Concentric
Vol. 48:1 (2022) ► pp.70–113

The syntax of nominal modification and complex noun phrases in Siwkolan Amis

| National Taitung University

This work investigates the syntax of nominal modification involving the linker a in Siwkolan Amis, one of the dialects of Amis, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan. Based on the two observed types of NP-ellipsis patterns and the formal licensing condition, I argue that Amis displays two types of modification. Modifiers in direct modification are functional heads projecting extended functional projections of NP, whereas those in indirect modification are modifier phrases base-generated at [Spec, ModP]. This distinction adds weight to J. Wu’s (2003) view that relative clauses and description-denoting modifiers marked by -ay are clausal modifiers that have a full-fledged CP structure from a cartographic perspective. Furthermore, I argue that a projects the Modifier Phrase (ModP) and is a modificatory clitic endowed with a [+mod] feature that attaches to a head element moving from a lower head position to form a morphological word. Very much in line with Philip (2012), the proposed analysis suggests that a is endowed with an interpretative profile in marking a modification relation between an extended functional projection (a modifier phrase) and a dependent word (a modified noun) in the nominal domain. Issues involved in dealing with the structure of Amis complex noun phrases are discussed.

Keywords: Amis, modification, NP-ellipsis, linker, formal licensing, cartography
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The empirical base
  • 3.Previous analyses
  • 4.Proposed analysis: Two types of modification
    • 4.1 a as a modificatory clitic
    • 4.2The structure of modification in Amis noun phrases
    • 4.3Implications for the grammaticalization of a
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • List of abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 2 May 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/consl.21014.jhe
References
Abney, Steven Paul
1987 The English Noun Phrase in its Sentential Aspect. Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
Alexiadou, Artemis, Liliane Haegeman, and Melita Stavrou
2007 Noun Phrase in the Generative Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Androutsopoulou, Antonia
1996 The licensing of adjectival modification. The Proceedings of the Fourteenth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 14), ed. by José Camacho, Lina Choueiri and Maki Watanabe, 17–31. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Bennis, Hans, Norbert Corver, and Marcel den Dikken
1998 Predication in nominal phrases. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 1.2:85–117. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carlson, Gregory Norman
1978 Reference to Kinds in English. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Chang, Henry Yungli
2017 The AV-only restriction and locality in Formosan languages. Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies 47.2:231–254.Google Scholar
Chen, Ting-chun
2018 Multiple Case Assignment: An Amis Case Study. Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
Chen, Victoria
2017 A Reexamination of the Philippine-Type Voice System and its Implications for Austronesian Primary-Level Subgrouping. Doctoral dissertation, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu.
Chen, Yi-ting
2010 The Amis left periphery. Oceanic Linguistics 49.2:339–358.Google Scholar
2016 Raising out of CP in Mod-Asp adverbial verb constructions in Amis. Oceanic Linguistics 55.1:116–133. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam
1981 Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Foris Publications.Google Scholar
1986 Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. New York: Praeger Publishers.Google Scholar
2001 Derivation by phase. Ken Hale: A Life in Language, ed. by Michael Kenstowicz, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo
1994 On the evidence for partial N-movement in the Romance DP. Paths Towards Universal Grammar: Studies in Honor of Richard S. Kayne, ed. by Guglielmo Cinque, Jan Koster, Jean-Yves Pollock, Luigi Rizzi and Raffaella Zanuttini, 21–40. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
1999 Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Delsing, Lars-Olof
1993 The Internal Structure of Noun Phrases in the Scandinavian Languages: A Comparative Study. Doctoral dissertation, Institutionen för nordiska språk, Lunds universitet.
Den Dikken, Marcel
2006 Relators and Linkers: The Syntax of Predication, Predicate Inversion, and Copulas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Den Dikken, Marcel, and Pornsiri Singhapreecha
2004 Complex noun phrases and linkers. Syntax 7.1:1–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ding, Picus Sizhi
2014 A Grammar of Prinmi: Based on the Central Dialect of Northwest Yunnan, China. (Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library: Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region.) Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fábregas, Antonio, and Rafael Marín
2015 Deriving individual-level and stage-level psych verbs in Spanish. The Linguistic Review 32.2:167–215. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P.
2005 The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar: Typological characteristics. The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar, ed. by Alexander Adelaar and Nikolaus Himmelmann, 110–181. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Holmer, Arthur
1993 Atayal clitics and sentence structure. Lund University, Department of Linguistics Working Papers 401:71–94.Google Scholar
Huang, Lillian M.
2008 Tàiyǎyǔ Fāngyán Yánjiū 3/3 [ Research on Dialects of Atayal 3/3 ] (NSC 96-2411-H-158-008-). National Science Council.Google Scholar
Huang, Lillian M., and Hsin-sheng Wu (Tali’ Hayung
) 2016 Taiyayu Yufa Gailun [ An Introduction to Atayal Grammar ]. New Taipei: Council of Indigenous Peoples.Google Scholar
Jenks, Peter
2014 Generalized clausal modifiers in Thai noun phrases. Syntax 17.4:299–342. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jheng, Wei-Cherng Sam
2021 More on the licensing conditions of NP-ellipsis and the structure of noun phrases in Mandarin. Taiwan Journal of Linguistics 19.1:89–159.Google Scholar
Jiang, Haowen
2011 On the grammaticalization of nominalization marker =ay in Kavalan and Amis: A contrastive study. LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts (ExtAbs), vol. 21, 191:1–5. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kayne, Richard S.
1994 The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kubo, Yoshihiro & Rai Tei
2013 A note on direct and indirect modification. The Bulletin of Central Research Institute, Fukuoka University 12.4:27–37.Google Scholar
Larson, Richard K., and Hiroko Yamakido
2008 Ezafe and the deep position of nominal modifiers. Adjectives and Adverbs: Syntax, Semantics, and Discourse, ed. by Louise McNally and Christopher Kennedy, 43–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Li, Yen-hui Audrey
2005 Ellipsis and missing objects. Linguistic Sciences 4.2:3–19.Google Scholar
2014a Born empty. Lingua 1511:43–68. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014b Structure of noun phrases: Left or right? Taiwan Journal of Linguistics 12.2:1–32.Google Scholar
Liu, Dorinda Tsai-hsiu
1999 Cleft Constructions in Amis. MA Thesis, National Taiwan University, Taipei.
Liu, Emma En-hsin
2003 Conjunction and Modification in Amis. MA thesis, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu.
Lobeck, Anne
1990 Functional Heads as proper governors. Proceedings of the 20th annual meeting of the North East Linguistics Society, vol. 201, ed. by Juli Carter, Rose-Marie Déchaine, Bill Philip and Tim Sherer, 348–362. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Amherst.Google Scholar
1995 Ellipsis: Functional Heads, Licensing, and Identification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Merchant, Jason
2001 The Syntax of Silence: Sluicing, Islands, and Identity in Ellipsis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2004 Fragments and ellipsis. Linguistics and Philosophy 27.6:661–738. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2006 Small structures: A sententialist perspective. The Syntax of Nonsententials: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. by Ljiljana Progovac, Kate Paesani, Eugenia Casielles and Ellen Barton, 73–91. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Müller, Gereon
1998 Incomplete Category Fronting. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Philip, Joy Naomi
2012 Subordinating and Coordinating Linkers. Doctoral dissertation, University College London, London.
Rizzi, Luigi
1990 Relativized Minimality. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Ross, Malcolm, and Stacy Fang-ching Teng
2005 Formosan languages and linguistic typology. Language and Linguistics 6.4:739–781.Google Scholar
Saito, Mamoru, Tzong-Hong Jonah Lin, and Keiko Murasugi
2008 N’-ellipsis and the structure of noun phrases in Chinese and Japanese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 171:247–271. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Samvelian, Pollet
2007a A (phrasal) affix analysis of the Persian Ezafe. Journal of Linguistics 43.3:605–645. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007b The Ezafe as a head-marking inflectional affix: Evidence from Persian and Kurmanji Kurdish. Aspects of Iranian Linguistics: Papers in Honor of Mohammad Reza Bateni, ed. by Simin Karimi, Vida Samiian and Donald Stilo, 339–361. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Sleeman, Petra
1996 Licensing Empty Nouns in French. Doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam.
Sproat, Richard, and Chilin Shih
1991 The cross-linguistic distribution of adjective ordering restrictions. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language: Essays in Honor of S.-Y. Kuroda, ed. by Carol Georgopoulos and Roberta Ishihara, 565–593. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tang, Chih-Chen Jane, Henry Yungli Chang and Dah-an Ho
1998 On noun phrase structures in Paiwan. Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies (New Series) 28.3:335–384.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
1994 Grammaticalization and lexicalization. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, vol. 31, ed. by R. E. Asher and J. M. Y. Simpson, 1481–1486. Oxford: Pergamon Press.Google Scholar
Tsai, Wei-tien Dylan
2007 Conjunctive reduction and its origin: A comparative study of Tsou, Atayal, and Amis. Oceanic Linguistics 46.2:585–602. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 Rethinking formal licensing. Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Formal Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China.
Tsuchida, Shigeru
1982 Subclassification of Amis dialects. Manuscript.Google Scholar
Van Gelderen, Elly
2008 Economy of merge and grammaticalization: Two steps in the evolution of language. Variation, Selection, Development: Probing the Evolutionary Model of Language Change, ed. by Regine Eckardt, Gerhard Jäger and Tonjes Veenstra, 179–198. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Wang, Yuyun Iris
2014 The Theory of Empty Noun in Chinese: With Special Reference to the Right Node Raising Construction. Doctoral dissertation, the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Watanabe, Akira
2006 Functional projections of nominals in Japanese: Syntax of classifiers. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 241:241–306. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wu, Hsiao-hung Iris
2013 Restructuring and clause structure in Isbukun Bunun. Oceanic Linguistics 52.1:69–85. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 Complex noun phrases and formal licensing in Isbukun Bunun. Oceanic Linguistics 53.2:207–224. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wu, Jing-lan Joy
2000 Ameiyu Cankao Yufa [ A Reference Grammar of Amis ]. Taipei: Yuan-Liou Publishing.Google Scholar
2003 Clausal modifiers in Amis. Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics 29.2:59–81.Google Scholar
2006 Verb Classification, Case Marking, and Grammatical Relations in Amis. Doctoral dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo.
2007 “Voice” markers in Amis: A role and reference grammar analysis. Language and Linguistic 8.1:95–142.Google Scholar
2011 Noun phrase conjunction in Amis. Language and Linguistics 12.1:109–139.Google Scholar
2016 Ameiyu Yufa Gailun [ An Introduction to Amis Grammar ] (1st edition). New Taipei: Council of Indigenous Peoples.Google Scholar
Wurmbrand, Susanne
2001 Infinitives: Restructuring and Clause Structure. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar