Proceedings of the LFG 02 Conference National Technical - CSLI ...

Abstract
VP-chaining in Oriya (an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Orissa, India) is argued to be leftrecursive
VP- adjunction in c-structure with a corresponding f-structure displaying recursive
embedding under the attribute ADJUNCT (for 'chain-adjunct'). Under VP-chaining ‘subject
sharing’ is obligatory and analyzable in terms of functional control ('token sharing'), 'object
sharing' is not only optional but in addition, does not require case or GF uniformity, and can
skip an intervening intransitive verb. It is therefore argued that ‘object sharing’ is a form of
anaphoric control ('reference sharing'). Passivization under VP-chaining needs to apply to all
verbs in the VP-chain. The uniformity of diathesis pattern is accounted for via the adoption of
an LFG architecture (from Butt, Dalrymple and Frank 1997) according to which c-structure
maps directly to a (rgument) structure, and a-structure in turn to f-structure. This analysis
allows us to 'drive' all the aspects of VP-chaining mentioned (apart from object sharing) from
an annotation of c-structure rules.
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