Phrasal movement within the Maori DP

Elizabeth Pearce

Victoria University of Wellington

Two kinds of constituents (the demonstrative or the possessive) can either precede or follow the noun in the Mäori DP.

(1)a.    tënei         ngeru    mangu    äku/a        Mere
           DET.this    cat         black       my/GEN  Mere
          'this black cat of mine/of Mere's'
    b.    täku/tä                       Mere    ngeru    mangu    nei
           DET.my/DET.GEN   Mere   cat           black      this

I propose that the ordering facts in (1a,b) are to be accounted for through derivations involving (remnant) phrasal movements to non-referential checking positions alongside phrasal extractions to referential checking positions.

The pre-N position is a referential checking site. In addition, possessives extract from positions lower down in the structure to an intermediate Genitive (Gen) checking position which has referential features.

In the derivations proposed, the use of iterative phrasal movement is supported by the mirror-image surface ordering possibility: (Det) - N - A - Num - Dem - (Poss), contrasting with surface Dem - Num - A - N ordering in languages like English in which the surface ordering corresponds to the universal base ordering (Cinque 2000). As in Koopman and Szabolsci (2000), head-movement has the effect of triggering the pied-piping of a complement. I propose, however, that such (remnant) phrasal movement applies only to complements which are predicational rather than referential. Where a complement phrase has referential features (which it can acquire from its (raised) head), such pied-piping does not apply. In that case, the only phrasal movement that can take place is of a predicational phrase in the Spec of the complement.

Thus the possessive fails to be "carried along" in the derivation producing the ordering in which both the demonstrative and the possessive are post-N:

(2)a.    te    [ngeru  mangu]i   nei    [ti    a           Mere]
            the   cat        black        this           GEN    Mere
   b.    *te    ngeru    mangu    a    Mere    nei   
            OK only if: '[this Mere's] black cat'

However, when the possessive is a pronoun, neither of the orderings in (2) are available:

(3)a.    *te    ngeru    mangu    nei    äku
    b.    *te    ngeru    mangu    äku    nei

In this case, the pronoun is a clitic and, although it starts out as the head of its own phrase, it must ultimately be attracted to a head position in the functional structure of the DP, either the head of GenP or the head of the pre-N referential projection. The failure of (3a) as against the well-formedness of (2a) results when the presence of a possessive clitic gives rise to a syntactic bonding between the clitic and the preposed phrase, preventing the further extraction of the phrase to the checking site above the DemP.

In this account of phrasal movement, the predicational/referential distinction provides a non-arbitrary means of distinguishing phrasal extraction from a complement position versus from a Spec position.


References
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2000. On Greenberg's Universal 20 and the Semitic DP. University of Venice Working Papers in Linguistics 10.2: 45-61.
Koopman, Hilda and Anna Szabolsci. 2000. Verbal Complexes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.