A unified analysis of Niuean Aki

This paper re-examines the alternation in the Polynesian language Niuean involving the instrumental particle aki (Seiter 1980, Massam 1998), where aki can appear both as an apparent preposition and in the verbal complex, with its notional object having concomitantly different properties. A lexically-driven analysis is given for this alternation; namely, the morphosyntactic behavior of aki and its notional object in this alternation, as well as in long-distance dependency constructions, can be understood through the basic lexical entry of aki and its interaction with various other lexical operations, including argument structure extension, argument composition, and constraints on gap realization.