On the syntax of possessor raising in Swahili
Traditionally Possessor Raising (PR) in Swahili is included with a variety of sentence types as an instance of the Nominal Construction and more recently defended as a member of that class. This study has two major goals: fIrst, it demonstrates that PR has syntactic distributional patterns which arg...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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LibraryPress@UF
1992-06-01
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| Series: | Studies in African Linguistics |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.flvc.org/sal/article/view/107418 |
| Summary: | Traditionally Possessor Raising (PR) in Swahili is included with a variety of sentence types as an instance of the Nominal Construction and more recently defended as a member of that class. This study has two major goals: fIrst, it demonstrates that PR has syntactic distributional patterns which argue against its inclusion in the Nominal Construction. Secondly, it addresses a central question: what features of an explicit grammar explain the syntactic properties associated with PR? After showing that the inferentially based proposals in Hinnebusch and Kirsner [1980] and in Scotton [1981] do not adequately characterize PR nor accommodate its syntax, semantics or interpretation, we present a Government Binding treatment ofPR's syntax. Finally, we provide a summary of our cross-linguistic research on PR's interpretation. |
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| ISSN: | 0039-3533 2154-428X |