Madija predicates
Madija is an Arauan language spoken in Peru and Brazil that has not been widely discussed in published articles. This thesis focuses on the predicates in this language. There are several areas involving the predicate that need to be analyzed. The first of these is an auxiliary verb whose distribution has not been explained. The second problem is that of three distinct morphemes indicating third person agreement on the verb. Thirdly, there are three morphemes used for number agreement with a plural subject. The final problem, that of gender agreement, has been discussed in a previous article (Adams and Marlett 1987) but will be used to support the analysis given in this thesis. This thesis seeks to give a unified analysis of Madija predicates while addressing the problem areas listed above.
The framework of Relational Grammar will be used to explore the problem areas above. In addition to developing an analysis for Madija predicates this thesis supports the work done by others in the field of RG. Some of the concepts that are shown to be valid include: the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978), the proposed universal structure of Antipassive (Postal 1977), impersonal constructions (Perlmutter 1983), and Clause Union as represented by Davies and Rosen (1988). Syntactic argumentation will be used to support each analysis.
The problem areas listed in the first paragraph are all explained through grammatical relations. The auxiliary verb is used whenever the main verb authorizes an initial 1. The three morphemes used for third person agreement are explained by positing ergative, antipassive, and impersonal transitive clauses. Selection of a morpheme to show agreement with a plural subject is controlled by the presence of an auxiliary which is a final P and, with a third person subject, by only one initial nuclear term arc which is a final term. The rule already proposed for gender agreement, that it is determined by the final absolutive, is supported. A complete list of the rules developed and defended throughout this thesis is given in Appendix A.