Licensing silent structure: the spatial prepositions of Shupamem

• Published in: Natural language and linguistic theory Vol. 32; no. 2; pp. 673 - 710
• Main Authors: Nchare, Abdoulaye Laziz, Terzi, Arhonto
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer 01.05.2014; Springer Netherlands; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Bantu Languages; Cartography; Language typology; Licenses; Licensing; Linguistic complements; Linguistics; Locative case; Natural Language Processing (NLP); Nouns; Philosophy of Language; Phonetics; Point of view; Prepositions; Semantics; Social Sciences; Space; Syntactic models; Syntactics; Syntax; Verbs; Greece; New York; Cameroon; Grassfields Bantu; Point of view markers; Phases; Spatial prepositions; Light nouns; Shupamem; Edge
• ISSN: 0167-806X; 1573-0859
• DOI: 10.1007/s11049-014-9230-3

This article offers a systematic account of the spatial expressions of Shupamem, a Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon that has very few items clearly identified as spatial prepositions, a good number of nouns that are used to denote locational relations, and a small and well-defined set of items in the extended projection of spatial Ps that denote the speaker's point of view, but often give the impression of locative or directional Ps. It is proposed that the structure of Shupamem locative PPs consists of two core components: (a) a functional head, PLoc, and (b) a nominal complement. Either component may surface without phonetic content once specific requirements are met, namely, once the Edge of the PP is minimally overt. We claim that the nominal complements denoting location, unlike referential nouns, depend on PLoc for their interpretation, as a result of which they may move to its Edge and license a silent P. A silent P is also licensed by the elements that denote speaker point of view, via movement of the silent P to the point of view head; this results in phase extension, and explains the obligatory presence of point of view markers in some contexts, giving the impression they are Ps. The account proposed for Shupamem offers a unified treatment of the functional structure of spatial Ps across typologically different languages, while it investigates how silent parts of the spatial P structure are licensed.