Malagasy Adverbs Andrea Rackowski McGill University August 1996

In The Structure of Malagasy, Volume II , ed. Ileana Paul, UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics, 1998.
The second option has the advantage of explaining the invariant position of the
subject in the sentence. It does not have the freedom of inserting its AgrP in several
different places (as the object does), so the subject always appears in the same position
(last). This choice is not optimal, however, because it requires that Agr sP and Agr oP
behave very differently in terms of generation, which seems strange since they are similar
categories with similar functions. To keep object and subject agreement more constant,
therefore, it is preferable to have Agr sP insert itself in the tree like Agr oP does (as long as
it maintains the additional restriction of inserting in only one position rather than several).
It is also invisible to movement like Agr oP, since it is similarly non-content-full.
When the subject raises directly to [Spec,AgrP], it does so over several
intervening Specs, which should be ruled out by Relativized Minimality. These Specs,
however, contain AdvPs which appear to be invisible to operations that involve different
types of elements. The subject is raising to an A-position, while the adverb Specs may be
either A’ positions, or even a third type of position - an Adverb position - which makes
them invisible to movement of other types according to Relativized Minimality. If the
Specs of AdvPs are A’ positions, or some third kind of invisible category, then the
subject cannot raise to them on its way to an A position, [Spec,AgrP], and is in fact blind
to them so that raising over these positions causes no violation of Relativized Minimality.
This explains the grammaticality of the subject skipping over supposed potential landing
sites in its movement from [Spec,VP] to [Spec,Agr sP].
The phenomenon of adverb invisibility to other types of raising has been argued
previously for Malagasy in Pensalfini (1995), who places ‘particles’ (adverbs here) in an
A’ position ([Spec,MoodP]) to explain the grammaticality of sentences in which elements
have raised across Spec positions. A similar account is also proposed for Basque in Laka
(1990).
Like the object, the subject may raise out of the VP at any point in the derivation,
because, during VP and adverb movement, it is never dominated by a category that could
serve as a barrier. Also like the object, once the subject inserts its AgrP and raises to it,
that phrase is invisible to movement, and so forces the category below it to move instead.
This similarity of behaviour with respect to AgrPs lends further support to the idea that
non-content-full categories are irrelevant to operations of content-full categories like
AdvPs.
Subject raising is shown in (61) and (62).
(61)
naP
2
na(dia) azaP
2
: 2
| aza veP
| 2
| 2
| ve TP/AgrS-P
| 2
| NPsubj 2
z------------- FP
21