A unified dynamic account of auxiliary placement in Rangi

Abstract

The Tanzanian Bantu language Rangi exhibits a comparatively and typologically unusual word order alternation in the future tense. Whilst declarative main clauses exhibit post-verbal auxiliary placement, the auxiliary appears pre-verbally in whquestions, sentential negation, relative clauses, cleft constructions and subordinate clauses. This paper examines this alternation from the perspective of Dynamic Syntax (Cann et al., 2005;Kempson et al., 2001). Dynamic Syntax (DS) is a parsingoriented framework which aims to capture the way in which meaning is established incrementally as a result of lexical input encountered in context. The paper presents a unified analysis of this construction found in Rangi, locating it within the wider workings of the language. It shows that this seemingly idiosyncratic constituent order is in fact predictable on the basis of a general constraint operative in the DS framework which prohibits the co-occurrence of more than one unfixed node, thereby also confirming the claim of Dynamic Syntax to constitute a grammar framework rather than merely a parsing device.

Structure building and thematic constraints in Bantu inversion constructions

“…There are differences between the two strategies, further discussed below, in terms of restrictions on further tree growth and information structure (see Marten 2011) and with respect to cross-linguistic variation in the coding of initial NPs (e.g. Gibson 2012), but for the present illustration the differences are not crucial. The building of an unfixed node for the initial NP is shown in (36):…”

“…In order to use the DS system for our analysis of Bantu inversion constructions, we will next set out our assumptions about Bantu clause structure and how this can be analysed in DS (see Cann et al 2005; Marten 2007, 2011; Marten, Kempson & Bouzouita 2008; Gibson 2012).…”

“…The next element to be parsed is the future tense marker ta- . The lexical actions for ta- , shown in the lexical entry in (29), contribute temporal information (which we express as a simplified feature ‘Tns(Fut)’ on the root node) and build fixed nodes for the (logical) subject and the predicate (reflecting the historical origin of many Bantu tense markers, including Swahili ta- , as verbs, see Gibson 2012).…”

Building meaning in context: A dynamic approach to Bantu clause structure

“…Verbs in the Bantu languages have been analysed as projecting fixed predicate‐argument structure, as well as making a semantic contribution to the clause, providing the full formula value annotation for the predicate node (Marten ; Kempson et al. ; Marten & Kula ; Gibson ). Analysing the verb as responsible for the introduction of fixed structure reflects the central role of verbs in the establishment of propositional structure.…”

The Bantu-Romance-Greek connection revisited: Processing constraints in auxiliary and clitic placement from a cross-linguistic perspective

“…The subject marker a-is the first element to be parsed. This is modeled as being projected onto a locally unfixed node (following previous accounts of subject markers across Bantu, see for example Kempson et al 2011;Marten 2011;Marten & Kula 2011;Marten & Gibson 2015;Seraku & Gibson 2015; as well as for Rangi Gibson 2012;2016). In fact, this unfixed node account is in part motivated by observed parallels between Bantu subject markers and clitics in Romance (Cann et al 2005;Bouzouita 2008a) and dialects of modern Greek (Chatzikyriakidis 2010) which are modeled in similar terms.…”