What’s No? Focus and Clause Linking in Malagasy

Contrastively focused constituents in Malagasy, a verb-initial language, occur at the left edge of the clause, separated from the remainder of the clause by the particle no (previous work has shown that no forms a constituent with what follows it, here called the NO-PHRASE). The Malagasy focus construction is usually analyzed as a pseudo-cleft: the focus phrase constitutes the main predicate of the clause, while the no-phrase is a DP containing a headless relative clause denoting the individual(s) of which the focus phrase is predicated (no itself being a special determiner or relative clause marker). In this paper I argue that the no-phrase and focus phrase are instead full clauses, with no acting as a clause linker—viz., a subordinating conjunction or complementizer. The focus construction is not a pseudo-cleft, but something akin to a conditional construction: hence, the relation between the nophrase and the focus phrase is not one of predication, but of implication. Rather than a headless relative (of category DP), the nophrase is an embedded clause (of category CP) which presents a presupposed state of affairs, a condition or temporal context necessary for evaluating the truth of the matrix clause.