Languages of Papua New Guinea

Topic as evidence for nominative case in Ma Manda

Issue Date:
2013
Extent:
pages 1-26
Abstract:
“Optional ergativity” in TNG languages has received significant recent attention (Christensen 2010, Hynum 2010, McGregor 2010, Rumsey 2010, Suter 2010). In these accounts, an ergative enclitic is analyzed as (typically) marking the A argument of transitive clauses, in addition to occasionally marking the S argument of intransitive clauses. The treatments given to this phenomenon have primarily dealt with the motivations for its presence vs. absence in discourse. This has led to many conclusions regarding its function, including discriminative, pragmatic, and semantic explanations. These approaches have failed to provide a satisfactory account of the data for some languages (e.g. they do not uniformly explain why the ergative is not actually required on the A argument, in contradistinction to its expected compulsoriness in a case-marking system). In this paper I provide a phrase structural account for Ma Manda, a Finisterre-Huon language of the TNG family. I argue that, rather than having an optional ergative marker as has been argued for several related languages, Ma Manda has developed nominative case. Following Donohue’s (2005) discourse-configurational approach, I establish that topic has an extra-clausal position as a sister of IP, while subject is a daughter of IP, as seen in (1). An NP that occurs in the Spec of CP does not bear a grammatical relation and does not take case morphology. An NP that occurs in the Spec of IP, however, is the grammatical subject and is obligatorily marked with nominative case. Finally, I also extend Donohue’s analysis and argue that this extra-sentential treatment of topic accounts for the comparatively infrequent usage of the nominative enclitic in intransitive clauses as well.
Publication Status:
Published
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Part of Series:
Language and Linguistics in Melanesia, 31(2)
Entry Number:
66286