Malagasy Adverbs Andrea Rackowski McGill University August 1996

In The Structure of Malagasy, Volume II , ed. Ileana Paul, UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics, 1998.
3 > VP > 10 > 9 > 8 > 7 > 6 > .......
This explains the order of the adverbs at least. If pre-verbal adverbs are still in the
Specs of FPs, center-embedding of adverbs must stop at the last available [Spec,AdvP],
being blocked by tsy in [Spec,NegP] from raising any further. The post-verbal reversal of
Cinque’s order in Malagasy thus results from this leapfrog movement, which is possible
because of the different composition of pre- and post-verbal adverbs in Malagasy. The
two groups behave differently and one reverses its order due to the different location of
the adverbs in the phrase.
The most serious problem with this account of movement is its lack of motivation.
Why should the AdvPs always raise above each other in such a complicated manner?
Again, the motivation for this movement is part of the basic problem of Kayne’s
restrictions. Perhaps their movement is motivated by a need for the heads of the phrases
to check features with one another in a Spec-head configuration. If this is indeed the
case, however, then the need to check is somewhat irregular, since the orders given here
can sometimes be overridden and reversed. A checking requirement would mean that the
FPs raise in a certain way for a certain reason most of the time, but are not required to do
so in all grammatical sentences. For the present, I again leave the problem of motivating
necessary movement to Kayne, suggesting only that is related to the type of checking
relation required in Malagasy.
6.4 The Verb Phrase
Now that the adverbs have the correct order, the problem is where the verb must
move to gain its surface position 7 . To get the surface word order in the present tree, the
VP has to move to [Spec,TsaraP], which in turn raises as in (52).
VP movement is demonstrated in (53).
(53) TsaraP
3
Spec Tsara’
VP i 2
tsara ti
6.5 The Object
Object location and definiteness are accounted for in this system by the position
of Agr oP. Objects optionally overtly move out of the VP to Agr oP, or they remain in the
VP and raise to Agr oP at LF. If the object is definite, it raises overtly to [Spec,Agr oP],
and if it is indefinite, it stays in the VP, which is compatible with research on Germanic
languages (Diesing (1992) and Duffield (1995)) in which the definiteness of an NP is
related to its location in or out of the VP.
7 The verb’s location in the sentence cannot be the result of head-movement through the adverb heads
because the object can raise with it. If head-movement were taking place, the only way the object could
raise with the verb would be if NP incorporation had taken place. Object incorporation, however, has not
occurred in Malagasy, because the object adjacent to the verb (before adverbs) may be a conjunction,
which is not allowed to incorporate into a head.
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