Malayalam Ceyy-Support and Its Relation to Event and Argument Structure
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Abstract
This paper argues for a faithful mapping between event/argument structure and morphosyntactic structure in Malayalam. The empirical focus of this article is the distribution of the verb ceyy- ‘do’ in a subset of coordinate constructions in the language, specifically VP coordinations involving action verbs. Under our account, this ceyy- serves to resolve a conflict between a morphological constraint (Stray Affix Filter, Lasnik 1981, 1997) on the one hand, and a syntactic constraint on movement out of coordinate structures (Coordinate Structure Constraint Ross 1967) on the other, making its overt appearance “last resort”. However, in spite of similarities with do-support in English, we find that formal accounts for the latter (Chomsky 1957, 1991, et. seq; Halle & Marantz 1993; a.o.) fall short of explaining the Malayalam facts. In our modified account, we claim that this ceyy- is the phonological realization of an Agent-introducing functional head in the sub-lexical structure of Malayalam action verbs (e.g. kick, eat, push). We motivate the selective presence of such a functional head in action-sentences and not statives by appealing to differences in their respective underlying argument- and event-structures, a distinction strongly argued for in the neo-Davidsonian literature, and now well-established within mainstream linguistic theory. Our evidence for the crucial role of syntactic and semantic factors in accounting for Malayalam ceyy-support challenges the widely-accepted formalization of do-support as a necessarily post-syntactic operation.