Two types of negation in Samoan and Tokelauan

Middleton, John (2023) Two types of negation in Samoan and Tokelauan. [Conference Proceedings]

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Abstract

Tokelauan and Samoan share many syntactic similarities, including predicate-raising, argument word order and case-assignment. One significant difference is the order of negation and pre-verbal pronouns; Samoan pre-verbal pronouns precede negation while the reverse is true for Tokelauan. This paper accounts for this difference by proposing each language has different types of negation; Samoan has in-situ negation while Tokelauan has clitic negation which attaches to a clause-initial host particle. The difference in order is caused by the roll-up effect of clitics in Tokelauan: a preverbal pronoun right-adjoins to negation, which in turn right-adjoins to the tense/aspect/modal (TAM) particle, resulting in a TAM-NEG-pro word order. Samoan negation remains in-situ, below the position of the pre-verbal pronoun (which may be analysed as a full DP raising to Spec,TP, or as an enclitic attaching to TAM), creating a surface TAM-pro-NEG order.

Item Type:	Conference Proceedings
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PL Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania
Divisions:	School of Pacific Arts, Communication and Education (SPACE)
Depositing User:	John Middleton
Date Deposited:	03 Jun 2025 22:36
Last Modified:	03 Jun 2025 22:36
URI:	https://repository.usp.ac.fj/id/eprint/14962

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