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"Malagasy language"
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Deriving nominals : a syntactic account of Malagasy nominalizations
This book provides original fieldwork data, uniquely generating all Malagasy deverbal nominals from a single structure-building mechanism, allowing variable syntactic attachment heights for different nominalizers and tracing the derivation of participant nominals to a relative clause source.
eBook
Phonological reanalysis is guided by markedness: the case of Malagasy weak stems
A key goal in phonology is to understand the factors that affect phonological learning. This article addresses the issue by examining how paradigms are reanalysed over time. Malagasy has a class of stems called weak stems, whose final consonants alternate under suffixation. Comparison of historical and modern Malagasy shows that weak stem paradigms have undergone extensive reanalysis in a way that cannot be predicted by the probabilistic distribution of alternants. This poses a problem for existing quantitative models of reanalysis, where reanalysis is always towards the most probable alternant. I argue instead that reanalysis in Malagasy is driven by both distributional factors and a markedness bias. To capture the Malagasy pattern, I propose a maximum entropy learning model, with a markedness bias implemented via the model’s prior probability distribution. This biased model successfully predicts the direction of reanalysis in Malagasy, outperforming purely distributional models.
Journal Article
Malagasy extraposition
Extraposition is the non-canonical placement of dependents in a right-peripheral position in a clause. The Austronesian language Malagasy has basic VOXS word order, however, extraposition leads to VOSX. Extraposed constituents behave syntactically as though they were in their undisplaced position inside the predicate at both LF and Spell Out. This paper argues that extraposition is achieved via movement at Phonological Form (PF). I argue against alternatives that would derive extraposition with syntactic A’ movement or stranding analyses. Within a Minimalist model of grammar, movement operations take place on the branch from Spell Out to PF and have only phonological consequences.
Journal Article
Malagasy N-bonding: A licensing approach
This paper provides an account of N-bonding in Malagasy, a predicate-initial Austronesian language of Madagascar. N-bonding refers to a morphological process in which material from nominal arguments is morphologically bound to certain heads (Keenan 2000). I argue that N-bonding can be analyzed as a reflection of head-head adjunction configurations which can be derived in Malagasy through Local Dislocation (Embick & Noyer 2007; Levin 2015; Erlewine 2018), a post-syntactic operation that yields a complex head. Following Levin 2015, I assume that Local Dislocation is implemented in Malagasy due to licensing constraints. More specifically, I show that N-bonding occurs in all constructions in which an argument cannot be licensed by the structural mechanisms available in the language. The resulting head-head configuration then feeds a language- specific morphophonological operation that inserts a bundle of features which surface as the N-bonding element. This approach not only accounts for the distribution of N-bonding and is consistent with the observed phonological patterns, but also offers an alternative view of underlying clausal structure and voice morphology in Malagasy.
Journal Article
WILLIAM L. ABBOTT IN MADAGASCAR: UNPUBLISHED CORRESPONDENCE RELATING TO THE EXPEDITIONS OF 1890 AND 1895
On 3 September 1895, the American naturalist Dr William L. Abbott wrote to the curator of the Smithsonian Institution Otis Mason stating that he had shipped artefacts for his department as well as other objects from Madagascar. In January 1895, Dr Abbott had returned to Madagascar, after his January 1890 journey to the Red Island, to fight alongside the Malagasy in their war against the French. Abbott accomplished the expedition of 1895 during an exceptionally difficult period for the Kingdom of Madagascar, a period that ushered in the dramatic end of Merina sovereignty. The article studies such period through the unpublished correspondence of the American naturalist and proposes a reconstruction of his activity as collector in Madagascar.
Journal Article
What Sluices in Malagasy Sluicing?
Ellipsis is restricted by an identity condition such that elided material must be identical in some fashion to a linguistic antecedent. The traditional view is that this requirement is syntactic in nature. Merchant, in 2001, however, proposed that the identity condition is fundamentally semantic, leading to a substantive debate in the ellipsis literature. Potsdam, in 2007, used the sluicing construction in Malagasy to argue for Merchant’s semantic licensing condition; however, since that work, at least two alternative analyses of sluicing constructions in other Austronesian languages, Nukuoro and Malay/Indonesian, have been proposed that are potentially compatible with a syntactic identity condition. This paper considers those analyses for Malagasy and shows that they are untenable. Malagasy sluicing requires that the antecedent and the elided clause need not be syntactically identical. It thus continues to support a non-syntactic identity condition on ellipsis.
Journal Article
Malagasy framing demonstratives and the syntax of doubling
Malagasy demonstratives appear simultaneously initially and finally within the DP and must be identical: ity boky ity ‘DEM book DEM’ “this book”. We argue that the unusual doubling pattern arises from multiple pronunciation of a single demonstrative formative and not from base-generation of two independent formatives. The primary goal is to show that doubling, which has been amply discussed in the verbal domain, particularly in the literature on verb doubling in predicate clefts, also occurs in the nominal domain and can be successfully analyzed with existing theoretical machinery.
Journal Article
Semantics and Pragmatics of Voice in Central Malagasy Oral Narratives
This study explores the semantic and pragmatic functions of voice in the Central dialects of Malagasy through quantitative and qualitative analyses of a set of oral narratives. Analysis of semantic transitivity parameters and discourse topicality reveals a preserved but weakened connection between nonactor voice and high transitivity and actor voice and intransitivity. Both actor voice and nonactor voice constructions have an active–transitive function; antipassive and passive functions are achieved, respectively, by omitting the patient in actor voice or the agent in nonactor voice. Patterns of anaphoric argument omission show that the pivot position has grammaticalized as the locus of high topicality arguments, paving the way for transition from a transitivity-dominated to a thematicity-dominated language. Thus, despite the morphological conservatism of the Central Malagasy voice system, it shows significant functional divergence from the most conservative Philippine-type systems.
Journal Article