Relative Clauses are Phrase Structural in Malagasy

Malagasy, spoken throughout Madagascar, is a Western Austronesian language with a characteristically rich voice system. In this paper we show first how to derive and compositionally interpret nuclear clauses built from verbs in different voices. They are directly projected from verbal affixes, not derived by A or A′ movement. Theta role assignment follows explicitly from semantic interpretation. And second, we derive and compositionally interpret relative clauses, again with no A or A′ movement. Merits of our analysis compared with most mainstream approaches are: 1. An explicit compositional semantic interpretation of relative clauses, thus (partially) accounting for how speakers interpret novel expressions. 2. A new derivation of the Malagasy “only subjects extract” constraint, which strongly satisfies Inclusiveness (Chomsky 2001:2) in that no traces or indices are used. 3. Simplicity and learnability: deriving and interpreting nuclear Ss is localized in about 20 verbal affixes plus feature checking (Agree) under adjacency. Theta role assignment is explicitly effected in the categories built by affixing roots. 4. A cognitive trigger for interpreting extraction by variable binding operators in voice-poor languages like English. English-Malagasy differences are “essentially morphological in character” Chomsky (1996:7).