Abstract
This study aims at investigating the syntactic structures of thee types of the existential constructions in Squliq Atayal, a dialect of Atayal spoken in the area of Fuxing District, Taoyuan, Taiwan. In Squliq Atayal, three types of existential constructions are observed, and I refer to them as the maki-existential, the kya-existential, and the cyux-existential. I point out that although these three constructions are all treated as existential constructions, their syntactic properties are rather different. In this thesis, I propose a non-unified analysis of these three existential constructions. First, I propose that maki is a lexical verb with a full set of verbal morphology, and takes a theme NP and a locative NP as its arguments. By contrast, kya in the kya-existential is a CP-level predicate, which is base-generated in V0, and though kya lacks a full set of verbal morphology, it also takes a theme NP and a locative NP as its arguments. I consider cyux also an existential predicate, which is not a typical lexical verb. Cyux, because of its evidentiality, undergoes cyclic head-movement into a higher position in the CP area. I suggest that cyux is a one-place predicate, taking a CP clause as its argument.