A COMPREHENSIVE THEORY OF SWITCH-REFERENCE (TAIRORA, HOPI, WARLPIRI).

Abstract

Switch-Reference (SR) is a phenomenon in which the coreferentiality of two (or more) subjects in a complex sentence is indicated by a morphological device. The purpose of this dissertation is to discuss recent work which deals with SR within the Government and Binding Theory, and propose an alternative analysis to it. The framework I will adopt for such an alternative analysis of SR is Categorial Grammar. A basic notion underlying Categorial Grammar is that an expression is divided into a functor and an argument, and each functor and argument are further divided into a functor and an argument until the division reaches to an undividable element. Given the assumptions that a functor and its argument must be compatible and that a functor has some subcategorization properties, I argue that "Agreement" phenomenon (subsuming agreement and disagreement) can be handled insightfully. Furthermore, I propose that such a treatment of "Agreement" can be extended to SR systems in general if we consider the "same subject" and "different subject" phenomena as cases of agreement and disagreement, respectively. I claim that a composite in which a SR morpheme appears forms a functor which takes another composite as its argument, and that the relation between the functor and its argument and the relation between some parts of the functor and its argument are characterized as "agreement" or "disagreement": The functor and the argument must be compatible as assumed above, and the nature of compatibility (whether "agreement" or "disagreement") is controlled by the subcategorization properties of the SR morpheme associated with the functor (i.e., if "same subject", the relation is agreement, and if "different subject", it is disagreement). By treating SR in this fashion, I intend to provide a unified analysis for apparently different SR systems in three diverse languages, namely, Tairora, Hopi, and Warlpiri.