Niuean: Predicates and arguments in an isolating language by Diane Massam (review)

Some academic books read like a culmination of decades of research, while other books make new and fresh proposals. This volume by Diane Massam fulfills both of these roles simultaneously. On the empirical side, we see the sum total of a life's work in documenting the morphosyntax of an endangered language. Yet at the same time, the analyses are novel, often radical departures from M's prior work in this domain. The primary themes of this volume involve the representation of arguments, the derivation of predicate-initial syntax, and the relationship between verbal and nominal syntax.

This volume is part of a series of books on endangered languages, with the focus here being the analysis of Niuean, an endangered Polynesian language with speaker communities living primarily in Niue and New Zealand. While the books in this series are not intended to be grammars, M offers the reader a comprehensive view of Niuean morphosyntax. The data are clearly presented, representing both corpus and elicited data, and reflect a long-standing research interest in the language. Each chapter includes detailed descriptions of language properties, including extensive data sets on tense-mood-aspect markers, voice particles, arguments, predicate types, the finegrained structure of nominals, and many others. While the presentation of the data ultimately serves the analysis, this book will be an invaluable resource for morphosyntactic data on Niuean and a rich source of data for theorizing about the key properties of Niuean grammar, including isolating morphology, verb- or predicate-initial word order, and ergative/absolutive alignment.

M situates her analysis within the framework of minimalism. Niuean is a language that, superficially, alternates between VSO and VOS word orders. Finding an explanatory account of the derivation of these word orders from a common underlying structure has been a long-standing research question within generative grammar (see e.g. Emonds 1980, Chung 2005, Clemens & Polinsky 2017). Breaking from her earlier work on Niuean, M makes a number of new and interrelated proposals. For example, observing the complete lack of phi-feature agreement in Niuean, M argues that Niuean does not have an inflectional phrase (IP) domain, contrary to her own prior work on the main-clause syntax of this language (see especially Massam 2001). With the abandonment of an IP, M takes the isolating and analytic properties of Niuean at face value. Moreover, with no IP domain, M seeks to explain the lack of relationship between inflection and verb, the optionality of tense marking, and the absence of nominative case.

The consequences of omitting IP from the structural analysis of Niuean are the focus of Chs. 2 and 3, along with issues of the main-clause syntax. A central issue in Ch. 2 is establishing the predicate-initial property of Niuean, which M substantiates via discussion of a number of predicate types as well as nominalizations. Modifiers are taken to be merged into the specifiers of various aspect heads in the order of their scope-taking properties; this order then inverts via roll-up movement, an analysis M extends to the nominal domain in later chapters. Ch. 3 considers arguments and continues the discussion of voice morphology from the prior chapter. The illustration of tense, aspect, and mood particles, along with the realization of voice, is comprehensive.

The main concern in Ch. 3 is the derivation of verbal sentences; while M maintains that Niuean is predicate-initial in all cases, this is where the analysis of VSO and VOS is addressed. Lack of an IP head also entails a reanalysis of M's (2001) VP-remnant movement analysis of VSO, which depends on VP-remnant movement to IP, driven by an EPP feature. M maintains, as with prior work, that Niuean is fundamentally predicate-initial on the surface but, following Kayne (1994), has an underlying structure in which the verb and object form a constituent separately from the subject. In order to derive VSO on...