A Grammatical Typology of Formosan Languages
摘要
This paper is a an overview of the syntactic and morphological typology of the Austronesian languages of Taiwan, as seen from a lexicase point of view. It is divided into two sections, the first on predicating constructions and the second on nominal constructions. The first section begins with a discussion of the concept of grammatical transitivity and the ways in which this property can be defined semantically, grammatically, and morphologically, and used to determine whether a language is accusative or ergative. Based on these considerations, it is shown that most or all of the Formosan languages, like the related languages in the Philippines, must be regarded as ergative rather than accusative in their case-marking patterns. Most of the languages surveyed are verb-initial, but all allow for pre-posed topics. Verbs are stative or active and transitive or intransitive. Intransitive verbs may be derived from transitives by a process of anti-passive derivation, and 'focus' is analyzed as a matter of lexical derivation producing predicate nouns and verbs which impose new interpretations on their Patient subjects. Fairly deep infinitival complementation is common, and words which translate as adverbs in Chinese or English are often grammatically main verbs. In all the languages, auxiliary verbs are grammatically the main verbs of their clauses, and carry information on aspect and negation as well as serving as hosts for clitic pronouns marking the actor and/or Patient of the full-verb clause embedded immediately below the auxiliary. Clauses with non-verbal predicates are also common, and as is typical in western Austro-nesian languages, they play an important role in the formation of content interrogatives and relative clauses. Noun Phrases, like clauses, have a strongly right-branching structure, except for the determiners, which occur before the head noun and are typically differentiated for case form. Head nouns may be modified by equational relative clauses, and wo