Edited by Kunio Nishiyama, Hideki Kishimoto and Edith Aldridge
Dedicated to John B. Whitman, this collection of seventeen articles provides a forum for cutting-edge theoretical research on a wide range of linguistic phenomena in a wide variety of Asian languages, including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Austronesian, Indo-Aryan, and Thai. Ranging from syntax and… read more
This paper argues against an agreement approach to voice markers in Philippine-type languages in favor of a direct analysis in which these markers have syntactic functions. In particular, I show how these markers relate to argument and event structure. The “patient voice” clause type is a basic… read more
This paper develops the proposal put forth by Aldridge (2015, 2016) for the emergence of ergative alignment in a first-order subgroup of the Austronesian family. I first provide new evidence for reconstructing Proto-Austronesian (PAn) as accusative rather than ergative. I then propose a… read more
This paper investigates two instances of alignment change, both of which resulted from reanalysis of a nominalized embedded clause type, in which the external argument was marked with genitive case and the internal argument was focused. We show that a subject marked with genitive case in the… read more
This paper proposes an account of the reanalysis of the Chinese morpheme 已yǐ from an intransitive verb meaning ‘end, terminate’ into a functional category marking completive aspect. We posit that this grammaticalization was triggered by the loss of aspectual affixes, prompting YI to be… read more
Wh-questions are formed on clefts in many Austronesian languages, a fact which is generally assumed to be related to their verb-initial basic word order. What is less clear is the precise relationship between verb-initial word order and the cleft strategy for questions. This paper proposes that the… read more
Object pronouns in archaic Chinese negated clauses were required to move out of VP and cliticize to the negator. Cliticization was gradually lost, however, beginning with clitic climbing from embedded clauses. A mysterious exception to the loss of clitic climbing was that raising remained… read more
This chapter proposes a diachronic account of VOS and SVO word-order variation in Austronesian languages. I argue that the ‘S’ argument in VOS languages is a topic which moves to an A'-position in the left periphery of the clause. Movement of the topic is followed by fronting of the remnant TP to a… read more
