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A SYNTACTIC APPROACH TO LEXICAL VARIATION IN THE MORPHOSYNTAX OF AMIS TRANSFER VERBS

The notes and articles in this series are progress reports on work being carried on by students and faculty in the Department. Because these papers are not finished products, readers are asked not to cite from them without noting their preliminary nature. The authors welcome any comments and suggestions that readers might offer. In the generative literature, ditransitive verbs have been analyzed as having either an applicative structure or a causative structure. Amis, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan, is typologically intriguing, since its verbs of transfer (e.g., 'give', 'sell', 'lend') always carry the " causative " morpheme, and may allow further " applicativization. " Amis also distinguishes two types of transfer verbs based on their subject (i.e., absolutive argument) selection in transitive constructions: one that prefers a goal as the subject (e.g., 'give'), and one that always selects a theme as the subject (e.g., 'sell'). This paper provides a syntactic approach to this lexical variation and argues that that subject selection in both types of transfer verbs is determined by their syntactic structures, which are conditioned by three major factors: (a) the nature of the root, (b) the projection of the apparent causative marking, and (c) the structural position of the apparent applicative morpheme. 1. INTRODUCTION. 1 In the generative literature, ditransitive verbs have been analyzed as having either an applicative structure (Marantz 1993; Pylkkänen 2002) or a causative structure (Pesetsky 1995; Harley 2002). Similar analyses have been applied to the studies of Formosan triadic constructions. For example, the applicative analysis proposed by S. Chen (2007) for Atayal and by H. Chang (2011a) for Tsou demonstrates how the 'give' verb allows for different applied argument (e.g., theme or goal), according to the applicative marker. As for Amis, transfer verbs are analyzed as causative verbs by Wu (2006a), due to the obligatory involvement of the causative morpheme. At first glance, the analyses on Formosan transfer verbs may appear straightforward, because of the presence of overt causative or applicative morphology. However, the analytical challenge lies in identifying the function of these two morphemes. Typically, a causative adds an external argument and, an applicative adds an internal argument to the verb (Dixon and Aikhenvald 2000). For example, for a typical transitive verb such as 'hunt', affixing the causative morpheme introduces a causer, whereas affixing the locative applicative morpheme introduces a location. If the same valency-increasing function applies to a transfer verb such …