In this week’s syntax/semantics group meeting on Thursday December 10th at 1:30, Connie Ting will present her current Eval 1 work on Malagasy. All are welcome!
In Malagasy, genitive DPs are bound to a preceding head via a morphological process called N-bonding (Keenan 1995). This process is reported to occur in constructions involving agents of non-active verbs, possessors, and complements of (certain) adjectives and prepositions. In the verbal domain, N-bonding has previously been argued to be tied to the presence of an overt (adjacent) agent (Pearson 2005). However, additional data shows that the N-bonding process is dependent on the presence of D-material (following Travis 2006). Given this, I propose that N-bonding can be explained under a clitic doubling approach, which both allows the analysis to be extended to the nominal domain and draws parallels to the pronominal system in the language.