Abstract
Hausa subjunctive markers have been claimed (Wolff, 1993; Newman, 2000; Jaggar, 2001) to correspond to two functionally distinct paradigms: a true subjunctive, and a “neutral”, unspecified for tense, aspect and mood, the latter being used, inter alia, in constructions involving sequences of events. In this paper, I shall demonstrate that the deletion approach advanced by Newman (2000) is not only limited in its empirical scope, but also theoretically questionable. Building on previous work by Schuh (2003), I shall argue instead for a single category and propose a formal treatment in HPSG which crucially builds on Schuh’s notion of the subjunctive as a dependent category, modelled as an embedding (qeq) requirement in Minimal Recursion Semantics. Using asymmetric projection of TAM information, together with constructional introduction of content, the present paper derives the distribution of the Hausa subjunctive and its specific interpretation by means of constraint interaction.
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Crysmann, B. (2013). The Distribution and Interpretation of Hausa Subjunctives: An HPSG Approach. In: Morrill, G., Nederhof, MJ. (eds) Formal Grammar. FG FG 2013 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8036. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39998-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39998-5_2
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