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Mismatching nominals and the small clause hypothesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2021

PAUL ROGER BASSONG
PAUL ROGER BASSONG*
Affiliation:
Department of Bilingual Studies, Faculty of Arts, Letters and Social Sciences, University of Yaounde I, Rue Joseph Tchoungui Akoa, Yaounde, P.O. Box 755 Yaounde, Cameroonprbassong@gmail.com
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Abstract

I propose a comprehensive analysis of what has been commonly referred in the literature to as split, discontinuous noun phrases or split topicalization. Based on data from Basaá, a Narrow Bantu language spoken in Cameroon, I partly capitalize on previous authors such as Mathieu (2004), Mathieu & Sitaridou (2005) and Ott (2015a), who propose that this morphosyntactic phenomenon involves two syntactically unrelated constituents which are only linked semantically in a predication relation in a small clause (Moro 1997, 2000; Den Dikken 1998). According to these analyses, split noun phrases are obtained as a result of predicate inversion across the subject of the small clause. Contrary to/but not against these views, I suggest that what raises in the same context in Basaá is rather the subject of the small clause as a consequence of feature-checking under closest c-command (Chomsky 2000, 2001), and for the purpose of labelling and asymmetrizing an originally symmetric syntactic structure on the surface (Ott 2015a and related work). The fact that the target of movement is the subject and not the predicate of the small clause follows from agreement and ellipsis factors. Given that the subject of predication is a full DP while the predicate is a reduced DP with a null head modifier, the surface word order is attributed to the fact that noun/noun phrase ellipsis is possible if the elided noun is given in the discourse and is recoverable from the morphology of the stranded modifier. This paper offers a theoretical contribution from an understudied language to our understanding of this puzzling nominal construction.

Keywords

BantuBasaámismatching nominalspredicationsmall clause
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , November 2021 , pp. 737 - 782
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Early versions of this work were presented at the 7th Southern African Microlinguistic Workshop (SAMWOP7), held at the University of Venda in 2018 and at the Research Seminar of the Department of Linguistics and Language Practice of the University of the Free State in 2019. I am grateful to the audience for their feeback. I am particularly indebted to Kristina Riedel for discussing various aspects of the paper. My gratitude goes to the three Journal of Linguistics referees for their insightful comments and suggestions. Lastly, I am indebted to Dieudonné Tonye, Moise Ntogue, Grégoire Konde and Cécile Ngo Bassong for their native speaker judgements.

Arabic numerals in glosses of Basaá examples designate noun class. The following abbreviations are used in the glosses: 2.sg = second person singular; acc = accusative; assocm = associative marker; aux = auxiliary; ben = benefactive; def = definiteness marker; erg = ergative; foc/f = focus marker; fv = final vowel; link = linker; loc = locative; nom = nominative; non past = non past tense; pass = passive; perf = perfective; prs = present; pst1 = past tense one; pst2 = past tense two; poss = possessive; refl = reflexive; rel= relative marker; s = subject agreement; sm = subject marker; subj = subjunctive; top = topic. The abbreviations nl and st are not explained in the source examples cited in examples (1c) and (2a) of this paper.

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