We are super happy to have David Adger (Queen Mary University of London) talking to us in FishFeed tomorrow at the usual time (1315 on Tuesday)! Look forward to seeing you all there.
Here is the title and a short abstract:
Structure and Order in the Kîîtharaka Nominal
Over 80% of the worlds languages have orders within their nominal phrase which can be derived from a simple hierarchy of functional elements like (1) via a homomorphic mapping (Cinque 2005, Abels and Neeleman 2012, Culbertson and Adger 2014):
(1) [ Demonstrative [ Numeral [ Adjective [ Noun ] ] ] ]
Homomorphic Mappings preserve the structure of (1) keeping the adjective closer to the noun than the numeral, irrespective of order, and the numeral closer to the noun than the demonstrative, again, irrespective of order. This derived 8 order that cover 83% of the typological data (Dryer 2018). Other orders of the elements in (1) are non-homomorphic, and as is well known (Greenberg 1965), some are not typologically attested. Those that are attested require something that goes beyond a homomorphic mapping, and I examine one such case from Kîîtharaka here. Kîîtharaka places the Noun initially, followed by the demonstrative, then the adjective and numeral with more freedom of order. Typical analyses of this order involve a movement of the noun to the initial position motivated by no more than getting the order right. I argue instead here that the Kîîtharaka noun phrase is built up from a series of predicative constituents. The syntactic function of class markers is to relativize the subjects of these constituents. I argue that this approach both provides a unified analysis of class marking and an account of a complex set of ordering effects within the Kîîtharaka nominal.
