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

the medicine is applied. If overtly realized it would therefore be marked by the post-position -
re.
(9)
mun ghaa-Thaa-ku dho-i ousadha lage-i byaandaze ka-li.
I wound-DEF-CASE wash-dM medicine apply-dM bandage do-PAST-1 st ,sg
In summary, shared objects can be functionally and morphologically distinct, while shared
subjects need to be also morphologically identical.
Finally, object arguments can be shared across intransitive verbs, as illustrated by (8) above,
while, in most cases, they cannot be shared across a transitive verb, as indicated in (10) below:
(10) #mun aambaTaa ne-i bhaata khaa-i kaaT-i khaa-il-i
I mango-the take-dM rice eat-dM cut-dM eat- PAST 1 st sg
‘Having taken the mango, I ate rice, then cut the mango and ate it.’ [intended meaning]
Passivization
An intriguing property of VP-chains is that under passivization, all verbs of the sequence have
to passivize. Since passivization does generally not apply to intransitives, 'chain passivization'
becomes impossible when one of the verbs in the sequence is intransitive; hence, e.g., (8)
cannot be passivized. (11) illustrates a grammatical passivization:
(11) maachha-Ti bhaj-aa jaa-i khi-aa-ga-laa
fish-the fry-PRTP go-Dm eat-PRTP-go-PAST.3 rd
‘Having been fried, the fish was eaten
Notice that the passive is expressed by adding the ‘light-verb’ jibaa ‘to go’. When associated
with the finite verb, jibaa is realized as a suffix that is followed by the number/person
inflection, while when associated with the dependent verb forms, it is perceived (and written) as
an independent word suffixed by the dependent marker, a difference that we will ignore in the
following.
3. The Analysis
3.1. The ADJUNCT status of the dependent VP
As indicated in figure 3, the series of VPs is conceived as a binary left-branching structure, with
the dependent VP in each case adjoined to the matrix V', giving the constellation in figure 5 as
the recursive minimal tree configuration in c-structure: 6
6 Other types of adjuncts in the verbal projection may conceivably also occur in the position of VPdep, but we offer
no considerations on this here. A technical reason why we don't want, e.g., the constellation
VP
/ \
VPdep VP
is to forestall structures where VPdeps originate under the rightmost VP - we assume strict left-recursiveness of the
VP-chain construction.
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