The Syntax of Medial Incorporation and Concrete Finals in Menominee

Discontinuous noun phrases in Yucatec Maya

“…Yucatec Maya differs sharply from the North American languages that productively use the extraction of attributive modifiers (demonstratives, quantifiers and adjectives) to left-peripheral positions for topics and foci; see e.g. Swampy Cree in Reinholtz (1999), Maliseet-Passamaquoddy in LeSourd (2004) and several Algonquian languages in Johnson & Rosen (2015). Yucatec Maya shares with these languages a rich verbal morphology and null arguments, which have been hypothesized as concomitants of the non-configurationality of these languages on a par with the discontinuity of NPs (see pronominal argument hypothesis by Jelinek 1984), but it turns out that this language disallows Left Branch Extraction – not a surprising fact given the presence of overt determiners (see Bošković 2005).…”

Second position without movement: Enclitic particles in Passamaquoddy

“…(Maliseet) Transformational analyses of second-position enclitics in languages such as Serbian and Croatian (see Diesing and Zec 2017 for a recent study) typically suppose that clitics occupy a functional head in the left periphery of the clause and that either a word or a phrase is then moved into the specifier of this functional head. An analysis along these lines is proposed for several Algonquian languages, with a focus on Menominee (Wisconsin), by Johnson and Rosen (2015). More on their approach shortly.…”

“…corpse 'After a little while [the body] was heard to fall again.' (Passamaquoddy) Johnson and Rosen (2015) attribute all discontinuity in the expression of Algonquian phrases to movement, including cases in which a clitic is stationed between segments of a phrase. For Menominee, they assume that a second-position clitic occupies a functional head, typically the head of Topic Phrase or Focus Phrase, at the left periphery of the clause.…”