24.2802, Review: Austronesian; Syntax; Malagasy, Plateau: Ntelitheos (2012)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-2802. Wed Jul 10 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.2802, Review: Austronesian; Syntax; Malagasy, Plateau: Ntelitheos (2012)

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Reviews: Veronika Drake, U of Wisconsin Madison
Monica Macaulay, U of Wisconsin Madison
Rajiv Rao, U of Wisconsin Madison
Joseph Salmons, U of Wisconsin Madison
Mateja Schuck, U of Wisconsin Madison
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin Madison
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Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 13:15:35
From: Megan Stone [stonem at email.arizona.edu]
Subject: Deriving Nominals

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-336.html

AUTHOR: Dimitrios  Ntelitheos
TITLE: Deriving Nominals
SUBTITLE: A Syntactic Account of Malagasy Nominalizations
SERIES TITLE: Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2012

REVIEWER: Megan Schildmier Stone, University of Arizona

SUMMARY

In “Deriving Nominals: A Syntactic Account of Malagasy Nominalizations”,
Dimitrios Ntelitheos provides an analysis of the properties of deverbal
nominals in Malagasy (Austronesian, Western Malayo-Polynesian) that is
situated within a larger debate about the nature of the lexicon.  As
Ntelitheos writes in the preface, “this book aims mainly to reinforce the
assumption that there is a single combinatorial component of grammar that
builds morphosyntactic strings” (xv).  Nominalizations are the perfect
testing-ground for this issue, as it has long been observed that they show
both lexical and syntactic properties, thereby mediating the lexicon-syntax
interface (Lees 1960; Vendler 1968; Chomsky 1970; Fraser 1970; McCawley 1988;
Grimshaw 1990; Marantz 1997; among many others).  Ntelitheos brings new data
to bear on this widely debated issue, arguing that the complex and diverse
range of nominalizations in Malagasy can be accounted for without appeal to a
generative lexicon.

Chapters 1 and 2 lay out the background information for the book.  In Chapter
1, Ntelitheos begins by providing an overview of the theoretical assumptions
that serve as the book’s foundation.  The book marries the basic tenets of the
Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1993ff) with a form of Distributed Morphology (DM;
Halle and Marantz 1993; Marantz 1995, 1997a) which holds that all
structure-building takes place in the syntax; this crucially differs from
standard DM in that, for Ntelitheos, there is no morphological component at
all.  Another significant assumption is a cartographic syntax in which there
is a highly articulated map of functional projections within the clause that
share the same hierarchical order cross-linguistically (Rizzi 1997; Cinque
1999, 2002; Belleti 2004).  The remainder of the chapter is devoted to a
summary of previous approaches to nominalizations.  Ntelitheos concludes the
chapter with his primary hypothesis:  “Derivational morphemes do not have
‘fixed’ subcategorization properties.  They attach at different heights
resulting in strings with diverse morphosyntactic properties” (33).

Chapter 2 summarizes the properties of Malagasy morphosyntax that are relevant
to the remaining discussion.  One of the most prominent features of Malagasy
clausal structure is the ‘trigger’, or rightmost Determiner Phrase (DP), which
encodes the highest argument.  The examples in (1) below show the three
available configurations: actor trigger (AT) in (1a), theme trigger (TT) in
(1b), and circumstantial trigger (CT) in (1c) (p. 38; some minor typographical
changes made for clarity).  The three different configurations are related to
different voice morphology on the verb:  V in (1a), TT in (1b), and CT in
(1c).

(1a) n.i.vídy boky ho any’ny mpianatra [ny mpampianatra]
PST.V.buy books for’ DET student [DET teacher]
‘The teacher bought books for the student.’

(1b) no.vid.in’ ny mpampianatra ho an’ny mpianatra [ny boky]
PST.buy.TT/LNK’ DET teacher for’ DET student [DET books]
‘The teacher bought books for the student.’

(1c) n.i.vidian.an’ ny mpampianatra ny boky [ny mpianatra]
PST.V.buy.CT/LNK’ DET teacher DET books [DET student]
‘The teacher bought books for the student.’

Chapter 3 is a discussion of some of the properties of gerundive and
referential nominalizations in Malagasy.  Here, as elsewhere, the cartographic
assumption is at the forefront:  phonologically identical elements are assumed
to merge at different levels in the syntax, forming nominalizations with
different properties.  The examples in (2) illustrate this point (p. 75; some
minor typographical changes made for clarity).

(2a) n.an.ditry ny adiny telo [ny f.an.doah.an-dRabe ridrina]
PST.V.last DET hour three [DET NMLZ.V.drill.CT/LNK-Rabe wall]
‘Rabe’s drilling wall(s) lasted for three hours.’

(2b) [ny f.an.doah.an-dRabe ridrina] dia ny fantsika
DET NMLZ.V.drill.CT/LNK-Rabe wall] TOP DET nail
‘Rabe’s (instrument for) drilling walls is a nail.’

The nominals, shown here in brackets, are phonologically identical, yet they
have different interpretations in the given contexts.  Ntelitheos shows that
nominalizations of the type in (2a) (i.e. gerundive nominals) have many more
verbal properties than those of the type in (2b) (i.e. result nominals).  This
fact, along with other data, leads him to propose a lower attachment height
for the nominalizer f- in result nominals than in gerundive nominals in
Malagasy.  Ntelitheos notes that “[not] all nominalizers are of the same type”
(73), and gives the example of gerundive –ing as an imperfective aspectual
marker in English.  In contrast, the f- nominalizer in Malagasy gerundive
nominals replaces tense, selecting for an EventP.

In Chapter 4, Ntelitheos discusses participant nominals in Malagasy, focusing
on instrumental and agentive nominals.  He contrasts nominals built on the AT
and CT forms of the verb, showing that CT-based nominals have many more
verb-like properties than AT-based nominals:  “accusative quantized arguments,
adverbial modification, eventive interpretation, linking of external
arguments, and episodic interpretation” (126).  From this, Ntelitheos
concludes that CT-based instrumental nominals encompass a larger syntactic
domain than AT-based instrumental nominals, and thus, that the nominalizer f-
merges much lower in the structure for the latter than the former.  Ntelitheos
also explains an apparent gap in the f-nominal paradigm (i.e. the lack of
f-root and f-TT nominals) by positing that the f-nominalizer requires AT voice
morphology in its local environment.

Chapter 5 provides a discussion of nominal clauses in Malagasy, which consist
of a determiner followed by a clause with a fully inflected verb, as in (3)
(p. 156; some minor typographical changes made for clarity).

(3a) [ny/ilay n.amp.i.anatra teny gasy an-dRasoa] dia Rabe
[DET/DEM PST.CAUS.V.study language Malagasy ACC.Rasoa] TOP Rabe
‘The/This (one that) taught Malagasy to Rasoa is Rabe.’

(3b) n.an.dritry ny adiny telo [ny/ilay n.amp.i.anatra teny gasy an-dRasoa]
PST.V.last DET hour three [DET/DEM PST.CAUS.V.study language Malagasy
ACC.Rasoa]
‘The/this (past) teaching of Malagasy to Rasoa lasted for three hours.’

While the examples in (3) have the same form, they contrast in interpretation,
distribution, and syntactic structure.  Ntelitheos argues that the form in
(3a) is a headless relative clause, which undergoes a nominalization process
via movement of the null clausal head to the specifier of the Complementizer
Phrase (spec-CP), while the form in (3b) is an action nominal.

In Chapter 6, Ntelitheos uses evidence from voice morphology, binding, and
modifier interpretation to argue that Malagasy participant nominals are
actually reduced headless relative clauses.  He summarizes his main claim as
follows:  “the overall structural design of participant nominalizations is
based on the structural design of relative clauses, i.e. a determiner
selecting for a clausal string that comes in different sizes” (213).
Ntelitheos then speculates about the cross-linguistic applicability of this
claim, incorporating data from six other language families, as well as other
Austronesian languages.  He draws a parallel between nominalizers and
relativizers to give credence to his claim about the similarity between
participant nominals and headless relative clauses.  Ntelitheos ends the
chapter by revisiting the syntax/lexicon debate, concluding that
f-nominalizations in Malagasy are best treated as syntactic rather than
lexical.

Chapter 7 provides a brief summary, as well as a discussion of potential areas
for future research.  Ntelitheos reiterates his goals of (1) introducing
original data from Malagasy, and (2) providing a purely syntactic account of
deverbal nominalizations.  Future research topics include an investigation of
what constrains the distribution of nominalizers and an extension of the
typological inquiry into the relationship between participant nominals and
headless relative clauses begun in Chapter 6.

EVALUATION

This book provides an excellent overview and analysis of Malagasy
nominalizations.  One of the book’s merits is its argumentation style:  the
author clearly elucidates his claims and then supports them with strong
evidence that is both empirical and theoretical.  For the most part, the line
of argumentation is easy to follow, which contributes to the book’s overall
readability.  Furthermore, the book has a good logical flow, beginning by
outlining the necessary background information and assumptions, and then
building on that work with new empirical facts about Malagasy and theoretical
claims about the structure of nominalizations.  Although Ntelitheos does a
thorough job of providing relevant background information, to the extent that
this book represents a continuation of previous work, knowledge of that
previous work would enable readers to get the most out of the current volume.
That said, I think this is a must-read for anyone interested in
nominalizations, Malagasy, or the lexicon-syntax debate.

While the argumentation in general is quite clear, there are some fine-grained
technical details that do not seem to be fully worked out.  For instance,
Ntelitheos asserts that “[t]he nominalizer defines the nominal domain and
therefore higher projections will be nominal in nature” (96) without
discussing what it means to be part of the nominal (or verbal) domain.
Moreover, there is no discussion of the mechanism that prevents higher
projections (above NominalizerP, where the nominalizing morpheme is merged)
from being ‘verbal’ (e.g. Tense) rather than ‘nominal’ (e.g. Number).  In
fact, though Ntelitheos does not discuss this possibility, verbal projections
must be allowed above NominalizerP, as in the case of certain denominal verbs
following a V > N > V derivation pattern.  The word ‘nominalization’ is one
such example:  the noun ‘nominal’ combines with the verbalizing suffix -ize to
yield the denominal verb ‘nominalize’, which in turn combines with the
nominalizer –ation to yield the deverbal noun ‘nominalization’.  The existence
of such forms indicates the need to allow verbal projections in the domain
above NominalizerP, and it is unclear how this should be handled in
Ntelitheos’s framework.  One might assume that syntactic selectional
restrictions are at play here, but Ntelitheos never spells that out, in spite
of the fact that he makes appeals to the nominal and verbal domains on several
occasions.

There is a similar issue concerning restrictions on the nominal domain and
variable attachment height.  In a chart on page 103, Ntelitheos shows the
varying properties of f-AT and f-CT result nominals, as opposed to f-CT
gerundive nominals.  The result nominals exhibit not only fewer verbal
properties, but also more nominal properties, than do the gerundive nominals,
including adjectival modification and the presence of possessors.  Ntelitheos
is explicit about how the additional verbal properties are available to
gerundive nominals:  the nominalizer attaches higher in the tree, allowing a
larger verbal functional structure inside the nominal.  However, the lack of
availability of nominal properties for gerundive nominals remains a mystery.
As Ntelitheos states, “At the point where the nominalizer attaches, the
extended projection changes from verbal to nominal.  This means that the
remaining functional domain will be nominal in nature and thus will allow for
the licensing of adjectives….Finally, possessors will also be available since
a possessor selects for nominal strings” (105).  If this is the case, what
prevents adjectives and possessors from appearing with gerundive nominals,
which contain a nominalizer, albeit higher in the structure than result
nominals?

In addition to these concerns, Ntelitheos’s analysis raises some other
questions that are fruitful areas for continued investigation.  One such area
is the general domain of variable attachment height.  Is there something
special about the nominalizer that allows it to have multiple attachment
sites?  If so, what makes it special?  Are there other morphemes that have
this property?  Finally, how does one reconcile variable attachment height of
morphemes with the cartographic program, which posits a universal hierarchy of
syntactic projections?

As a final point of critique, there are persistent glossing errors throughout
the book that cast a shadow on some of the finer points of the argumentation
and analysis.  As an illustrative example, page 190 has three numbered
examples, each of which has at least one glossing error:  In (320a), the
Malagasy and English gloss lines have the name ‘Rabe’, while the free
translation line has the name ‘Rasoa’; in (321a), the present tense morpheme
is glossed as PST; in (322a), the name ‘Rabe’ is again used in both the
Malagasy and English gloss lines, while ‘Rasoa’ is used in the free
translation; and in (322b), the phrase ‘ny zaza’ (‘the child’) has no English
gloss.  Although these are relatively benign errors -- particularly the
name-glossing mistake, which is rampant throughout the book -- they underscore
the potential for much more serious errors in the glossing, which readers who
are not familiar with the Malagasy language will be unable to detect.
Additionally, there are numerous inconsistencies in the use of brackets,
slashes, periods, and apostrophes within examples that make them at times
difficult to decipher.  The tree diagrams are similarly confusing, as the
lines indicating movement go through or behind parts of the tree, obscuring
movement paths.  Example (43) on page 46 exemplifies this concern; all three
trees suffer from this confusing notation.

All in all, Ntelitheos achieves his goal of bringing new empirical data from
Malagasy to bear on the debate about the nature of nominalizations, and
provides some compelling arguments for his position that these data can be
handled without a separate morphological component.  “Deriving Nominals” is an
important contribution to the study of morphosyntax, both empirically and
theoretically, and I highly recommend it to readers interested in this field.

REFERENCES

Belleti, Adriana. 2004. Aspects of the low IP area. In L. Rizzi (ed.), The
structure of IP and CP: The cartography of syntactic structures, Vol. 2,
16-51. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 1970. Remarks on nominalization. In R. A. Jacobs and P. S.
Rosenbaum (eds.), Readings in English transformational grammar, 184-221.
Waltham, MA: Gin and Company.

Chomsky, Noam. 1993. A Minimalist Program for linguistic theory. In K. Hale
and S. J. Keyser (eds.), The view from Building 20: Essays in honor of Sylvain
Bromberger, 1-52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic
perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cinque, Guglielmo. 2002. Complement and Adverbial PPs: Implications for clause
structure. Paper presented at the 25th GLOW Colloquium. Amsterdam. April 9-11,
2002.

Fraser, Bruce. 1970. Some remarks on the action nominalization in English. In
R. A. Jacobs and P. S. Rosenbaum (eds.), Readings in English transformational
grammar, 83-98. Waltham, MA: Gin and Company.

Grimshaw, Jane. 1990. Argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lees, Robert. 1960. The grammar of English nominalizations. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.

Halle, Morris and Alec Marantz. 1993. Distributed morphology and the pieces of
inflection. In K. Hale and S. J. Keyser (eds.), The view from Building 20:
Essays in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, 111-176. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

McCawley, James D. 1988. The syntactic phenomena of English. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.

Marantz, Alec. 1995. A late note on Late Insertion. In Y.-S. Kim, K.-J. Lee,
B.-C. Lee, H.-K. Yang, and J.-Y. Yoon (eds.), Explorations in generative
grammar: A festschrift for Dong-Whee Yang, 396-413. Seoul: Hankuk Publishing
Co.

Marantz, Alec. 1997. No escape from syntax: Don’t try morphological analysis
in the privacy of your own lexicon. In A. Dimitriadis, L. Siegel, C.
Surek-Clark, and A. Williams (eds.), University of Pennsylvania Working Papers
in Linguistics, Vol 4.2, Proceedings of the 21st Annual Penn Linguistics
Colloquium, 201-225.

Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In L. Haegeman
(ed.), Elements of grammar, 281-337. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Vendler, Zeno. 1968. Adjectives and nominalizations. The Hague: Mouton.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Megan Schildmier Stone is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Linguistics at
the University of Arizona.  She is currently a Visiting Student at the
University of Texas at Austin.  Megan’s research interests are in morphology,
syntax, and semantics, with two special areas of focus:  deverbal
nominalizations, with a particular interest in Cherokee; and English idioms
and other noncompositional uses of language.  She is currently writing her
dissertation, which uses both traditional and experimental methods to
investigate what idioms can tell us about the limits of human language.








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