Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka, 2025.
“Atayalic subjects and the nature of nominative.”
Manuscript, CNRS/Nantes Université.
This paper investigates the nature of subjecthood properties in the Atayalic group of Austronesian languages of Taiwan. Subjects in these languages are associated with a clause-final, high structural position, topic properties, and nominative case, which I show to be morphologically reduced as compared to non-nominative cases. I therefore propose a model of Austronesian voice alternations where subject promotion involves structure-removal of a nominal’s K layer. What is traditionally described as nominative-marking, then, reflects the D head of a K-less nominal which occupies a topic position. The analysis is motivated further from the possibility of nominative-marked non-subjects in certain configurations. The paper also offers detailed accounts for Austronesian voice and subject selection and for pronominal clitics and clitic doubling, based on recent advances in the detailed description of syntactic operations.