Malagasy Adverbs Andrea Rackowski McGill University August 1996

In The Structure of Malagasy, Volume II , ed. Ileana Paul, UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics, 1998.
(pre-verbal adv in M.) (post-verbal adv in M.) (hypothetical (tena?))
In the structure which I will eventually use to account for the word order facts of
Malagasy, some different forms of these options are necessary. The different behaviour
of pre- and post- verbal adverbs is captured structurally in the tree because one type is
head of its own phrase and the other is located in the Spec of a functional phrase.
The center-embedding tree that I propose here to account for the adverb order
facts of Malagasy requires much movement in order to satisfy both Kayne and Cinque.
In it, the underlying order of Cinque's adverb categories is preserved, as are Kayne’s
right-branching and SVO requirements, and the 'onion skin' movement of adverb phrases
creates the surface order of adverbs.
This tree has the advantage of allowing one half of a framing pair to select the
other half through a head-head relation, which is the usual relation involved in selection,
which is exemplified as “the relation of a verb to (the head of) its Noun Phrase
complement” (Chomsky 1993). In this case it is, similarly, the relation of a framing
element to the head of its framing partner complement.
The ‘onion-skin’ tree is relatively restrictive in the orders and movement it
predicts, but does have a problem with explaining why the movement that occurs should
do so. At first, there also appear to be extraction violations and problems with
Relativized Minimality. While some of these problems can be explained, others must be
treated as inherent in the Kayne framework, where movement must often occur without
strong motivation.
6.1 Translating Cinque
Following Cinque’s proposal, Malagasy would look underlyingly like Italian,
which we will see runs into problems. Even if the verb could head-move up to the
approximate position in which it is found in Malagasy sentences (between tsy and
mihitsy), there are several problems with this type of structure for Malagasy. First of all,
the object is in the wrong position. There is no explanation in this tree for why the object
can surface before post-verbal adverbs. Supposing, however, that some insertion
mechanism could explain the position of the object, the subject is still in the wrong
position. Finally, even supposing the subject somehow moves to its surface position,
there persists the huge problem of the completely reverse post-verbal adverb order.
In this tree, the post-verbal adverbs are in the opposite order from the actual one
in which they surface. The different possible combinations of pre-verbal adverbs, which
are nicely explained by the existence of two separate NegPs (as discussed in section 5.1
above) also have no explanation in this structure, and neither does the location of the
speech act adverbs, which in Malagasy are sentence-final and in this tree are sentenceinitial.
These major differences from Cinque’s expected result indicate either that Cinque
is wrong in claiming a cross-linguistic domain for his theory, or that certain processes
occur in Malagasy to create this unexpected word order.
6.2 Negation
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