Abstract
This study investigates the grammatical realizations of adverbial modifiers in Takituduh Bunun, one of the Austronesian languages spoken in central and southern Taiwan. It is found that epistemic adverbials such as possibly may be realized as modals in their syntactic projections, while manner adverbials such as quickly may occur in a position lower than the VoiceP. In other words, adverbials with wider scope of modification normally occupy higher structural positions. The fact that grammatical behaviors of Takituduh adverbials are largely attributable to their semantic functions suggests the strong correlation between semantic and syntactic facets of the language. Two aberrant phenomena pertaining to Takituduh adverbial constructions have been discussed in this study. For one thing, temporal adverbials which are deficient in argument structures can take patient-focus markers; for the other, in some mono-clausal adverbial constructions such as mistakenly, lexical verbs are able to take instrumental/beneficiary focus markers. Most of the current theories fail to account for the aforementioned findings because the focus system is assumed to be simply an inflectional or a lexical category. Therefore, this study adopts the split VoiceP hypothesis proposed by H. Chang (2008) and argues that, in line with Tsou—another Austronesian language—Takituduh non-actor focus construction may be comprised of two layers of projections, namely, voice and applicative, whereas its actor focus counterpart lacks the applicative projection. The fundamental concept is that the lower applicative head first triggers the movement of an oblique argument in its c-commanding domain to its specifier position, and the higher voice head subsequently triggers the movement of this applied object to the grammatical subject position. Adverbial stacking and prefix copy are also addressed in this study. It is found that epistemic adverbials must precede all other adverbials, while manner adverbials can only occur after other types of adverbials in terms of linear ordering. With regard to prefix copy, it has been verified that the copy domain in Takituduh is limited within AspectP. This study further argues that the head-movement analysis of prefix copy is untenable in Takituduh, because the multiple copy spell-out is left unexplained and the Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 1990) is not observed. On the contrary, this study suggests that Takituduh lexical prefixes in prefix copy constructions are more likely verb class markers based-generated in functional projections and serve to delimit the range of verb types.