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Gibson, Hannah (2016) 'A unified dynamic account of auxiliary placement in Rangi.' Lingua, 184. pp. 79-103.

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Abstract

The Tanzanian Bantu language Rangi exhibits a comparatively and typologically unusual word order alternation in the future tense. Whilst declarative main clauses exhibit post-verbal auxiliary placement, the auxiliary appears pre-verbally in wh-questions, sentential negation, relative clauses, cleft constructions and subordinate clauses. This paper examines this alternation from the perspective of Dynamic Syntax (Cann et al., 2005; Kempson et al., 2001). Dynamic Syntax (DS) is a parsing-oriented framework which aims to capture the way in which meaning is established incrementally as a result of lexical input encountered in context. The paper presents a unified analysis of this construction found in Rangi, locating it within the wider workings of the language. It shows that this seemingly idiosyncratic constituent order is in fact predictable on the basis of a general constraint operative in the DS framework which prohibits the co-occurrence of more than one unfixed node, thereby also confirming the claim of Dynamic Syntax to constitute a grammar framework rather than merely a parsing device.

Item Type: Journal Article
Additional Information: Accepted version of an article published online by Elsevier, available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2016.06.003
Keywords: Dynamic Syntax, syntax, Bantu languages, morphology, word order
SOAS Departments & Centres: Departments and Subunits > School of Languages, Cultures & Linguistics > Department of Linguistics
Legacy Departments > Faculty of Languages and Cultures > Department of Linguistics
ISSN: 00243841
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2016.06.003
Date Deposited: 17 Jun 2016 12:47
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/22597

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