General remarks

Chichewa is a language of the Bantu language group in the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Kordofania language family. It is spoken in parts of east, central and southern Africa. Since 1968 it has been the dominant language in the east African nation of Malawi where, until recently, it also served as that country's national language. It is spoken in Mozambique (especially in the provinces of Tete and Niassa), in Zambia (especially in the Eastern Province), as well as in Zimbabwe where, according to some estimates, it ranks as the third most widely used local language, after Shona and Ndebele. The countries of Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique constitute, by far, the central location of Chichewa. Because of the national language policy adopted by the Malawi government, which promoted Chichewa through active educational programs, media usage, and other research activities carried out under the auspices of the Chichewa Board, out of a population of around 9 million, upwards of 65 percent have functional literacy or active command of this language. In Mozambique, the language goes by the name of Chinyanja, and it is native to 3.3 percent of a population numbering approximately 11.5 million. In Tete province it is spoken by 41.7 percent of a population of 777, 426 and it is the first language of 7.2 percent of the population of Niassa province, whose population totals 506, 974 (see Firmino 1995). In Zambia with a population of 9.1 million, Chinyanja is the first language of 16 percent of the population and is used and/or understood by at least 42 percent of the population, according to a survey conducted in 1978 (cf. Kashoki 1978). It is one of the main languages of Zambia, ranking second after Chibemba.

Relative-clause formation

The discussion in the preceding chapter concentrated on verbal complementation with some remarks on the structure of the noun phrase. The noun phrase also provides instances of complementation with a nominal head. It has been indicated that within the noun phrase modifiers of the head noun are marked for agreement with that noun, in number and gender. In this chapter attention will turn to the relative clause. The relative clause provides the easiest form of clausal complementation to a nominal head. It also gives variations that are of intrinsic interest to theoretical discussion (cf. Biloa 1990; Chomsky 1977; Keach 1980; Ngonyani 1998b). However, before focusing on the relative construction, comment should be made on non-relative complements. These would be of the variety exemplified in English by expressions such as ‘the belief that it would rain.’ In Chichewa such complementation is achieved by the use of the verb tí ‘say’ in its infinitive form kutí ‘that,’ linked to the head noun by the associative marker -á. For most speakers the sequence á+ kutî is reduced to otí. Ordinarily, the coalescence of the associative marker á with the infinitive marker ku to o is sensitive to the syllable structure of the ensuing verb. It is possible when the verb is not monosyllabic. This is one of the cases when the sensitivity to syllable structure is over-ridden, generally characteristic of some dialects of Chichewa, such as the dialect described by Mark Hanna Watkins (1937).

Introductory remarks

In the previous chapters the discussion centered round aspects of clause structure and the morphological elements that appear prefixed to the verb stem in Chichewa. Those elements are more oriented towards aspects of clause structure. It has been argued that they are best analyzed as clitics, since they are syntactic elements that happen to be phonologically bound (cf. Mchombo 2002a). The arguments for analyzing them as clitics will be reviewed below. Clitics are formally and functionally different from the affixes that are suffixed to the verb root. These include affixes that encode passivization, causativization, applicativization, as well as affixes that derive verbs with stative reading and reciprocal verbs. These affixes are traditionally known as extensions. The verbal extensions are functionally different from the clitics in that they affect the number of expressible NPs that the predicate can support. In brief, they are involved in transitivity patterns. They are formally different in that they do not conform to the basic syllable structure of the language. They have a -VC- syllable organization where the language normally requires CV syllable structure. The involvement of verbal extensions in argument structure will be the focus of this chapter.

The structure of the verb

The verb in Chichewa (and other Bantu languages) is traditionally analyzed as comprising a verb root (VR) to which such verbal extensions as the causative, applicative, reciprocal, passive, etc., are suffixed, and to which prefixes are added. The latter encode information pertaining to agreement with the subject and object(s) of the verb, tense/aspect, negation, modality, etc.

Overview

Hitherto, we have assumed a simple model of clause structure in which canonical clauses are CP+TP+VP structures. However, in §5.6 we suggested that it is necessary to ‘split’ TP into two different auxiliary-headed projections in sentences like He may be lying – namely a TP projection headed by the T constituent may and an AUXP projection headed by the AUX constituent be; and in §7.3 we suggested that it may be necessary to posit a further Asp (ect) head in clauses to house the preposed verb in quotative structures like ‘We hate syntax’, said the students. In this chapter, we go on to suggest that CPs, VPs and NPs should likewise be split into multiple projections – hence the title of the chapter. We begin by looking at arguments that the CP layer of clause structure should be split into a number of separate projections: Force Phrase, Topic Phrase, Focus Phrase and Finiteness Phrase. We then go on to explore the possibility of splitting verb phrases into two or more separate projections – an inner core headed by a lexical verb, and an outer shell headed by a light verb (with perhaps an additional projection between the two in transitive verb phrases). Finally we turn to look at evidence for a split projection analysis of NPs.

Overview

In this chapter, we take a look at the syntax of agreement. We begin by outlining the claim made by Chomsky in recent work that agreement involves a relation between a probe and a goal (though it should be noted that the term goal in this chapter is used in an entirely different way from the term goal which was used to denote the thematic role played by a particular kind of argument in relation to its predicate in §7.5). We look at the nature of agreement, and go on to show that nominative and null case-marking involve agreement with T. Finally, we explore the relationship between the [epp] feature carried by T and agreement, and look at the consequences of this for control infinitives on the one hand and raising infinitives on the other.

Agreement

In traditional grammars, finite auxiliaries are said to agree with their subjects. Since (within the framework used here) finite auxiliaries occupy the head T position of TP and their subjects are in spec-TP, in earlier work agreement was said to involve a specifier–head relationship (between T and its specifier). However, there are both theoretical and empirical reasons for doubting that agreement involves a spec–head relation. From a theoretical perspective (as we saw in §4.9), Minimalist considerations lead us to the conclusion that we should restrict the range of syntactic relations used in linguistic description, perhaps limiting it to the relation c-command created by merger.

Overview

In broad terms, this book is concerned with aspects of grammar. Grammar is traditionally subdivided into two different but interrelated areas of study – morphology and syntax. Morphology is the study of how words are formed out of smaller units (called morphemes), and so addresses questions such as ‘What are the component morphemes of a word like antidisestablishmentarianism, and what is the nature of the morphological operations by which they are combined together to form the overall word?’ Syntax is the study of the way in which phrases and sentences are structured out of words, and so addresses questions like ‘What is the structure of a sentence like What's the president doing? and what is the nature of the grammatical operations by which its component words are combined together to form the overall sentence structure?’ In this chapter, we begin (in §1.2) by taking a brief look at the approach to the study of syntax taken in traditional grammar: this also provides an opportunity to introduce some useful grammatical terminology. In the remainder of the chapter, we look at the approach to syntax adopted within the theory of Universal Grammar developed by Chomsky.

Traditional grammar

Within traditional grammar, the syntax of a language is described in terms of a taxonomy (i.e. classificatory list) of the range of different types of syntactic structures found in the language. The central assumption underpinning syntactic analysis in traditional grammar is that phrases and sentences are built up of a series of constituents (i.e.

Overview

In this chapter, we look at recent work by Chomsky suggesting that syntactic structure is built up in phases (with phases including CP and transitive vP). At the end of each phase, part of the syntactic structure already formed undergoes transfer to the phonological and semantic components, with the result that the relevant part of the structure is inaccessible to further syntactic operations from that point on. (An important point of detail to note is that since we are outlining Chomsky's ideas on phases here, we shall follow his assumptions about the structure of verb phrases and expletive structures.)

Phases

In §8.5, we outlined Chomsky's claim in recent work that all syntactic operations involve a relation between a probe P and a local goal G which is sufficiently ‘close’ to the probe (or, in the case of multiple agreement, a relation between a probe and more than one local goal). We noted Chomsky's (2001, p. 13) remark that ‘the P, G relation must be local’ in order ‘to minimise search’, because the Language Faculty can only hold a limited amount of structure in its ‘active memory’ (Chomsky 1999, p. 9). Accordingly, syntactic structures are built up one phase at a time. Chomsky suggests (1999, p. 9) that phases are ‘propositional’ in nature, and include CP and transitive vP (more specifically, vP with an external argument, which he denotes as v*P).