The syntax and pragmatics of clausal constituents in Tsou discourse

This study concerns various syntactic constituents in Tsou and the roles they play in information transmission in discourse. Since one of the prominent functions of languages has to do with communication between people, we intend to show how the grammar of Tsou serves this function, especially how the grammatical markers in Tsou are recruited for producing and interpreting in talks in interaction.
Based on careful examinations to natural discourse data, some frequently co-occurring linguistic elements are grouped as a constituent. Tsou indicative clauses have a rather fixed constituent order: predicate phrase occurs first, and lexical NPs occur on the right of the clauses. The constituents are sedimented patterns composed of various linguistic elements, which have gradually become the grammatical formatives, represent a processing unit for particular in discourse, and further make up clauses in Tsou.
Not just identifying these grammatical formatives, this study also show the functions of some grammatical elements in natural discourse. Linguists have not yet reached a consensus on the functions of many grammatical markers in Tsou, like ‘voice’, ‘case markers’, ‘auxiliary verb’, etc. This study provided some discourse-based observations to enhance our understanding on the pragmatic uses of these various grammatical markers.
Case markers in Tsou are multi-exponential markers. Given that having a unique grammatical device—voice system operating in clauses of Tsou, all NPs in a clause of Tsou can be divided into two groups: NP marked with nominative markers, and NPs marked with oblique markers. Based on their distribution in texts of natural discourse, the main function of case markers in clauses of Tsou tends to locate the relative distance, either visually/spatially or psychologically, between the speaker and the referents in a text. Aside from locating various spatial and psychological distances, they also serve to certain discourse functions. As for the definiteness and referentiality, case markers do not directly encode the information; whether an NP is definite must be inferred from context.
On the other hand, based on careful observations on the corpus of natural discourse, this study also shows that, the occurrences of the three referential expressions (lexical NPs, pronominal forms, and zero) show skewing distributions: pronominals only occur in A role and S role NPs, and lexical NPs in this language are also largely recruited to express activated information. This typological uniqueness can be ascribed to the language-specific morpho-syntactical requirements on the form of referential expression in Tsou discourse: A/S role NPs obligatorily occur in bound pronominals attached to the auxiliary verbs.
The morpho-syntactic A/S role constraint in Tsou also regulates the occurrences of discourse topics in a particular position in clauses. NPs in A/S position of clauses tend to be mentioned several times, so as to maintain their high topicality. In addition, animate nouns have priority over inanimate nouns in their ability to assume the A/S roles. In light of this, the syntax and pragmatics of Tsou can be treated as mutually affecting each other, and thus reflects a discourse universal that a discourse topic tends to be in A/S roles in clauses.
This study also shows the pragmatic use of auxiliary verbs in Tsou discourse. The auxiliary verbs in Tsou encode TAM information of events. Their distributions in discourse attest that using proximate auxiliary verbs in Tsou clauses is the prototypical use, not a pragmatic manipulation for special effects like historical present.
Moreover, this study shows how voice has to do with the argument structure of the verbs in Tsou. The syntactic valence of verbs in Tsou has at most four voice alternatives, signaling different ways of syntactic marking on the argument NPs. The semantic nature of a verb in Tsou only gives propositional context of an event; it is one’s knowledge of the voice alternatives that tells how the argument NPs of a verb are syntactically realized.
Lastly, this study shows different types of ‘main verb’ in Tsou found in the corpus of natural discourse and fieldwork notes. In Tsou, what the ‘main verb’ constituent in a clause is made of is quite complex. Not only verbs may occur as the main verb, it is also possible for multiple linguistic forms working together revealing a single clausal reading to function as the main verb in clauses. Semantically, these various structures of a main verb encode complicated event structures. The semantic relation between each element in such complicated verb phrases includes an event with its modifying expressions (in portmanteau verbs), reason or cause of an event (in synthesized verbs), an action and its non-referential affectee (in noun-incorporated verb phrase), serialized actions (juxtaposed verb pairs), etc. These verb phrases may go through different kinds of morpho-syntactic operations.