Topics in Zuni syntax

This thesis investigates in detail three syntactic phenomena on Zuni (isolate, Southwestern US) of particular relevance to current linguistic theory: the syntax of pronominal elements, the structure of unaccusatives and passives, and the interaction of agreement and sublexical syntactic structure. The discussion of each of the three topics introduces extensive new data based on extensive fieldwork which has not previously received treatment in descriptive accounts of Zuni.;Drawing on evidence from the syntactic behavior of Zuni pronouns, an account of pronominal syntax is proposed based on the notion that pronouns consist of inflectional features that must be licensed by being situated in the minimal domain of some head containing functional features. Independent evidence for the presence of these licensing features is presented from constraints on the operation of person hierarchies in Kashmiri and Southern Paiute. The theory proposed is able to account for certain data from O'odham and Belfast English problematic for a derivational theory of pronominal licensing. The proposals are extended to account for multiple WH movement in Zuni, and in addition, the phenomenon of default accusative case in English.;The properties of unaccusatives and passives in Zuni are next discussed in detail. It is argued that these Zuni constructions are quite different from their counterparts in Icelandic. Zuni unaccusatives and passives arguments are assigned structural accusative case, behave like structural objects, and in addition lack any sort of structural subject, overt or null. It is argued that Zuni unaccusatives and passives have 'hidden' causative event structure, and furthermore that while a hidden causative analysis of St'at'imcets Salish proposed a complex lexical event structure for a monomorphemic verb root, Zuni morphology reveals a fairly direct mapping between lexical event structure and morphosyntax. It is suggested that languages range from more to less opaque in the mapping from semantics to syntax and that Zuni sits at the transparent end of this cross-linguistic scale. Based on how event structure is realized in Zuni morphosyntax, it is argued that all of the structural properties of Zuni unaccusatives and passives are predicable.;The final chapter argues that while agreement is generally assumed to be a surface syntactic phenomenon, certain non-canonical patterns of agreement in Zuni provide evidence for the representation of lexical structure according to syntactic principles and that syntactic constraints apply to such structures. A locality constraint is argued to restrict the domain of certain Zuni agreement. Operations involved in deriving the complex lexical structures proposed earlier are responsible for destroying the local domain of agreement of some lexical head L, resulting in the absence of agreement on L. The locality constraint on Zuni agreement may be overridden under certain circumstances, providing further evidence to support the proposals that the absence of verbal agreement in certain contexts in Zuni is not an indication of lexical irregularity but rather reflects deeper syntactic regularities.