Malagasy Adverbs Andrea Rackowski McGill University August 1996

In The Structure of Malagasy, Volume II , ed. Ileana Paul, UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics, 1998.
TsyP 4
Neg MihitsyP
5
Agr oP 2
3 mihitsy t i
Object 3
agr IntsonyP
3
FoanaP j 2
2intsony t j
TanterakaP k 2
3 foana t k
TsaraP l 2
2 tant. t l
VP m2
tsara tm
“*Tsy lamba manasa tsara tanteraka foana intsony mihitsy Rakoto.”
To avoid this ungrammatical occurrence, there must be a restriction in the
grammar such that non-content-full phrases like AgrP (which have no lexical content and
are simply markers of agreement) are invisible to movement and cannot move
themselves. In contrast to this, content-full phrases like AdvPs can and, in this case must,
move, which may be attributable to the phrases being differently specified (some sort of
A or A’ or Adverb positions), and thus being irrelevant to each other’s movement
operations.
A possible reason for the forced raising of AdvPs past AgrP may have to do with
the requirement to check features in a Spec-head relation. Because AgrPs are noncontent-full,
they do not have features which need to be checked with the AdvPs, but the
lower AdvPs still must be checked, and so are always forced to raise around the AgrPs,
consistently leaving them in their place. This would explain why lower AdvPs always
raise to the next-highest Spec, and why the appearance of Agr oP does not interrupt this
process, simply leaving the AgrP where it first appears.
The issue of the existence of non-content-full categories is interesting for further
exploration in more varied contexts, and may have implications for Chomsky’s view of
the (non)necessity of non-content-full categories like AgrPs, but is left here as a
beginning point for future research.
6.6 Matetika
The ‘normal’ occurrences of matetika at the beginning of the adverb string and
after the subject remain constant in position. The invariantly ordered elements ‘aza>
speech act> subject’ also have consistent positions which can simultaneously be
explained by matetika movement. To obtain their surface order, MatetikaP must raise up
to [Spec, AzaP], which places it directly after na(dia) and also creates the order of the
rest of the constant elements. 8
8 In contrast, I propose that the post-verbal version of matetika is a different, flexible matetika which can
insert its phrase in a range of locations. The key point to make is that, rather than being the same
MatetikaP that appears sentence-initially and -finally, the post-verbal occurrence of matetika is a different
19