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Pseudo noun incorporation and DOM: Definiteness agreement in DaakakaDefiniteness Agreement • December 13th, 2018
Introduction: In Daakaka (West Ambrym, Northern Vanuatu, Oceanic), so-called semitransi- tive (ST) verbs show definite agreement with their objects: While specific/definite objects trig- ger object marking on the verb, unspecific/indefinite objects are not cross-referenced (1)-(2) (von Prince 2015). Although this type of agreement has been widely observed in Micronesian and ‘Melanesian’ languages (e.g. Odango 2014, Franjieh 2012, Sugita 1973; cf. Næss 2013, Margetts 2008), a formal analysis is still pending. In this paper, I draw a connection between ST and Pseudo Noun Incorporation (PNI), a phenomenon well-established for Polynesian (Col- lins 2017, Chung & Ladusaw 2004, Massam 2001). Based on extensive corpus data (von Prince 2013) and own additional fieldwork, I present evidence that objects in both ST and PNI are subject to the same syntactic/semantic constraints which suggests a parallel analysis of both constructions. Adopting Massam (2001) on PNI, I assume that while definite ob
