Conjunctive Reduction Revisited: Evidence from Mayrinax Atayal and Southern Paiwan

This paper is a follow-up investigation of conjunctive reduction in two Formosan languages, Mayrinax Atayal and Southern Paiwan. We examine phenomena surrounding the two-way grammaticalization of linkers—that is, adverbialization and complementation—and show how it works to shape the sentence structure of the two languages. More specifically, it is argued that the Mayrinax linker 'i' licenses modal/evaluative construals on the complementizer layer, and control/middle construals on the lexical layer. In addition, Southern Paiwan evidences a third type of linker construals on the inflectional layer, where frequency/repetitive/locative expressions are introduced, and permutation around the linker a is allowed. All in all, our comparative study of Mayrinax and Squliq Atayal confirms that even in a language without overtly grammaticalized linkers, conjunctive reduction can still be in action, albeit in its final stage of development.