Nominalization and Wh-Extraction in Chamorro

• Published in: Toronto working papers in linguistics Vol. 16; no. 2; pp. 63 - 75
• Main Author: Belanger, Suzanne
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.01.1999
• ISSN: 1705-8619

In this paper, I examine a specific aspect of wh-agreement in Chamorro, a Western Austronesian VSO language. Wh-agreement in Chamorro is characterized by the presence of particular morphology that appears on the verb when wh-words are extracted & which "replaces the regular agreement morphology." Though previous proposals have dealt with extraction of subjects as well as direct objects & obliques, I will only take up extraction of the latter two in this paper. That is, I will offer an analysis for the particular morphology found in the context of wh-extraction of direct objects & obliques, namely nominalization. For this analysis, I assume a late-insertion model (eg, Halle & Marantz, 1993), where items do not enter the derivation pre-inflected. I also assume the basic framework of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995), specifically, that movement is motivated by the need to check formal features & that there exists a distinction between overt movement & covert movement. In the first section, I present a description of the wh-agreement pattern. The second section reviews previous analyses of the wh- morphology, specifically Chung (1982, 1994, 1998) & Richards (1997). In the third section, I present my analysis of "wh-nominalization." 20 References. Adapted from the source document