Negation in Kavalan: A Syntactic Study
Date Issued
2005
Date
2005
Author(s)
Yeh, Yu-Ting
DOI
en-US
Abstract
Abstract
This thesis attempts to examine the negation in Kavalan within the framework of Government and Binding Theory and address the following questions: (a) What are the categorial statuses of the negative elements in Kavalan? (b) Where are their structural positions? Do they correspond to a NegP projection? If they do, where should the NegP be projected? (c) What is the structural hierarchy of these negative elements?
This study is primarily composed of two parts. The first part includes a descriptive discussion of the semantic properties and syntactic distributions of seven negative elements in Kavalan (mai, usa, naRin, sukaw, Rayngu, taqa, and ita). In the second part, the syntactic categories of these negative elements and the structures of the corresponding constructions are analyzed, in view of their morphological behaviors, their relationship with the following constituents/verbs, as well as the distribution of tense/aspect inflections and bound pronouns. The relative hierarchy of these negative elements is also discussed in the second part.
The results demonstrate that mai in declaratives and naRin in imperatives belong to negative auxiliary verbs while usa in equational sentences should be classified as negative copula. Each of these three negative elements heads a NegP between TP and AgrP and functions as a potential intervening head that blocks V from head-moving to T (or Asp). The Neg head instead moves upwards itself to pick up the tense/aspect inflections.
On the other hand, mai in possessives/existentials, sukaw, Rayngu, and taqa are categorized as negative verbs that are not any different from common positive lexical verbs except for their inherent negative feature. Consequently, they are structurally located as V heads which regularly undergo head-movement to pick up agreement, tense, and/or aspect morphemes. Since there is no need to project an additional NegP for the corresponding constructions, they cannot be called negative constructions though they indeed express negative meanings. Finally, ita is viewed as a negative particle due to its frozen expression.
In addition to a conclusion, the last chapter provides a typological comparison regarding the realization of main negators (i.e., mai, usa, naRin) in Kavalan and other Austronesian languages.
Subjects
否定
詞類
助動詞
動詞
質詞
句法結構
NegP
噶瑪蘭語
Negation
Category
Auxiliary
Lexical Verb
Particle
Phrase Structure
Kavalan
Type
other
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