proto-southwestern-tai revised: a new reconstruction - seals 22

A MINIMALIST APPROACH TO
AMIS 1 VOICE MARKERS
Yi-Ting Chen
Arizona State University, Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages
0 Abstract
This paper relates underlying properties of Amis voice markers to each other in a
Generative approach. This study suggests that the computation of Aktionsart in the head of
the Inner Aspect phrase (InnAspP) is the key to correlate these underlying properties. This
computation not only contributes to the default temporal, aspectual, and modal (TAM)
reading of Amis voice markers but also differentiates undergoer voice markers from
others. This study first assumes that the realization of the feature morpheme is determined
by whether the argument it introduces is raised to the edge. Then agreement takes places,
which explains why the voice marker and the nominative NP are co-indexed.
1 Introduction
1.1 Purpose of the study
The purpose of this study is to use the Generative model to interpret the underlying
properties of Amis voice markers, which have been investigated in many descriptive (e.g.,
T-L. Huang, 1988; Y-J. Huang, 1988; Wu, 2000) and Role and Reference Grammar (RRG)
studies (e.g., Wu, 2005; 2006; 2007). Unlike previous research which has tried to reveal
the entangled complexities of Amis voice markers, this study intends to correlate these
underlying properties from the perspective of Generative Grammar and provide an
interpretation of why they are connected.
1.2 What are voice markers?
Voice systems are commonly found in approximately 60% of western Austronesian
languages (Himmelmann, 2005), a group to which Amis belongs. What are voice markers
in terms of Generative linguistics? Many researchers (e.g., Guilfoyle, Hung, and Travis,
1992 (GHT hereafter); Rackowski, 2002; Chang, 2004; Pearson, 2005) have pursued an
answer to this research question and provided various proposals. This study reviews
several well-known proposals in the following section.
1
Amis, a Formosan language, belongs to the western Austronesian language family. The speaker
population is approximately 172,000, according to the census report by the Council of Indigenous People
in Taiwan in November 2007.
Yi-Ting Chen. 2009. A Minimalist Approach to Amis Voice Markers. Journal of the Southeast Asian
Linguistics Society 2:23-36.
Copyright vested in the author.
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