Title

Argument-Drop in Formosan Languages: Pronominal Morphology and Discourse Topic

Author

Wei Ting-chi

Genre

Article

Pages

561-625

Download

PDF

Language

Chinese

Key words

argument drop, personal pronoun, discourse topic, licensing

Abstract

  This paper argues that Neeleman & Szendröi’s (2007) radical pro drop analysis in terms of pronominal morphology cannot completely capture the phenomenon of argument drop in six Formosan tongues, Amis, Paiwan, Puyuma, Bunun, and two Atayal dialects. We propose that the topic-oriented analyses of Huang (1984a, 1984b, 1987, 1989) and Sato (2011), which take discourse topic as a major licenser of argument drop, should be adopted to account for the missing arguments in these languages.