Thematic arguments and semantic roles in Hausa: Morphosyntax and lexical semantics interface

I present aspects of Hausa grammar within the framework of Kiparsky's Direct Linking Theory, focusing on the morphosyntax-semantics interface. In particular, I concentrate on the distinction between alternations that are morphologically marked on the verb versus similar alternations where the stem of the verb remain intact. Alternations that are not (entirely) signalled by morphology in the verb have been largely ignored in the literature. When it comes to giving an account of such alternations where the verb remains unchanged and yet the argument structure is altered, it seems complicated for the present syntactic theories to provide a simple account.;This thesis examines such types of (morphologically unmarked) alternations and provides a simple account which captures the cross-linguistic generalizations in natural languages. In particular, the thesis focuses on the search for universal principles governing those alternations involving changes in the argument structure of verbs.;The thesis seeks to shed light on the nature of these less familiar non-morpholexical constructions such as middles, antimiddles, lexical reflexives and reciprocals, lexical applicatives, and lexical causatives. In order to capture the puzzling data presented in Hausa and similar languages, it is necessary to distribute the predicate's meanings contained in its lexical entry into three levels of representations: Lexical Conceptual Structure (LC-structure) where all aspects of meanings are represented, Thematic Structure (Th-structure) where only grammatical (linguistic) aspect of meanings (Th-roles) are represented, and the Lexical Structure (L-structure) where the grammatical functions are expressed though predictable from the universal thematic hierarchy. Having separated LC-structure from Th-structure, we also constrained morphosyntax to be sensitive only to information contained at Th-structure; thus, morphology is blind to all the information contained at LC-structure. With this basic background, we show that suppression or addition can be performed at either Th-structure as in passive and antipassive, or at LC-structure as in middle and antimiddle. Similarly, addition of an extra argument in the morpholexical causative, and promotion of a lexically demoted Th-role in the applicative will be treated as operations at Th-structure; whereas similar grammatical changing processes which are not signalled by verb morphology will be treated as operations to the LC-structure. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.).