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In:The Documentarist Turn: From observable linguistic behaviour to typological generalizations
Edited by Sonja Riesberg, Uta Reinöhl and Birgit Hellwig
[Studies in Language Companion Series 240] 2026
► pp. 644–670

Chapter 23
On syntactic uniformity and the functional effects of verbal DPs

ORCiD logo with link | Structure et Dynamique des Langues (CNRS UMR8202 — INALCO — IRD)
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Abstract
According to Himmelmann’s (2008: 249) Syntactic Uniformity Hypothesis for Tagalog, words from different lexical categories “may all occur in essentially the same basic syntactic positions”. This is also true of Movima (isolate, Bolivia). Based on a documentation corpus of spontaneous Movima discourse data, this paper furthermore shows that argument DPs containing a verb are particularly frequent in combination with nonverbal predicates (nouns, quantifiers, demonstratives), i.e. their syntactic distribution is diametrically opposed to that of nominal DPs. It is suggested that in a system with syntactic uniformity, a DP containing a verb functions in a way similar to a headless or light-headed relative clause in a language whose verbs and nouns are more strictly linked to the syntactic categories predicate and argument.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Syntactic uniformity in Movima
    • 2.1Structural similarities and differences between nominal and verbal predicates
      • 2.1.1Identical person encoding on possessed nouns and transitive verbs
      • 2.1.2Verbal and nominal predicates
    • 2.2The distribution of verbal DPs in discourse
      • 2.2.1Orientation: Verbal DPs have a predictable meaning
      • 2.2.2DP-internal operations: Valency decrease and negation
  • 3.The discourse use of verbal DPs
    • 3.1The combination of verbal argument DPs with different predicate types
    • 3.2Nominal predicate, verbal argument: Focus
    • 3.3Quantifiers as predicates
    • 3.4Demonstratives as predicates (existential constructions)
  • 4.Conclusion: The predicate status of content words in DPs
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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