Pied-piping With Inversion
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Pied-piping with inversion is a special word order phenomenon found in some languages, such as those in the Mesoamerican linguistic area.


Introduction

The phenomenon was first named and identified as an areal characteristic of the Mesoamerican linguistic area in Smith Stark (1988). Some sources also refer to pied-piping with inversion as "secondary wh-movement".
The phenomenon can be described as follows: *the language has
wh-movement In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, or wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words. An example in English is the dependency formed between ''what'' and the object position ...
. *the language has
pied-piping In linguistics, pied-piping is a phenomenon of syntax whereby a given focused expression brings along an encompassing phrase with it when it is moved. The term was introduced by John Robert Ross in 1967. It references the legend of the Pied Pip ...
; that is, when certain words undergo wh-movement, the interrogative word and also the rest of the phrase moves. *the word order within the pied-piped phrase is different from the order of ordinary phrases. The following examples from San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec illustrate the phenomenon. As the following example shows, a possessor normally follows the noun that is possessed in the language (Broadwell 2001): If the possessor is questioned, the whole noun phrase must pied-pipe to the beginning of the sentence. However, the order of the initial phrase must have the possessor before the possessed: The difference in order between the noun phrases in (1) and (2) illustrates pied-piping with inversion. (1) shows the ordinary order in which the noun is the first element of the noun phrase, and (2) shows the inverted order found in the pied-piped noun phrase. The following examples from Tzotzil (Aissen 1996) show the same process:


Types of phrases that show pied-piping with inversion

Pied-piping with inversion is most often found in noun phrases (NP), prepositional phrases (PP), and quantifier phrases (QP). The following example, also from San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec, shows pied-piping with inversion in a quantifier phrase (Broadwell 2001): As the example shows, languages may differ in the degree to which pied-piping with inversion is obligatory in different types of phrases. Therefore, (2) above shows that the interrogative must be initial in a pied-piped noun phrase, but (5) shows that the interrogative is only optionally initial in a pied-piped quantifier phrase. The following example, from Quiegolani Zapotec (Black 2000), shows pied-piping with inversion in a prepositional phrase:


Environments for pied-piping with inversion

The most frequently-cited type of sentence with pied-piping with inversion is a wh-question. However, a number of Mesoamerican languages also show fronting of negative or indefinite phrases to a position before the verb. Fronted negative and indefinite phrases may also show pied-piping with inversion in some languages, as in this example from San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec: The noun phrase "anyone's dog" has been fronted to a position before the verb and shows the same pied-piping with inversion that is seen in other syntactic environments.


Languages that show pied-piping with inversion

Pied-piping with inversion seems to be found in all Mesoamerican languages. It is documented in many of them, including several
Zapotec languages The Zapotec languages are a group of around 50 closely related indigenous languages of Mesoamerica, indigenous Mesoamerican languages that constitute a main branch of the Oto-Manguean languages, Oto-Manguean language family and are spoken by th ...
(San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec, Tlacolula de Matamoros Zapotec, and Quiegolani Zapotec), several Mayan languages ( Kʼicheʼ, Kaqchikel, Chuj, Tzotzil), and several Mixtecan languages (Ocotepec Mixtec, and Copala Triqui). Pied-piping with inversion is unusual outside Mesoamerica but is documented in Sasak, an
Austronesian language The Austronesian languages ( ) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples). They are spoken b ...
of
Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...
(Austin 2001). A somewhat similar phenomenon is found in a number of
Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Southern Africa. The most widely spoke ...
in which certain pronominal objects of prepositions appear before the preposition. The following Dutch examples show that ordinary objects follow the preposition ''op'' "on," but the pronouns ''er'' "it," ''daar'' "there," and ''hier'' "here" precede the preposition: : Ik reken p je steun ("I count on your support.") : Ik reken erop/daarop/hierop ("I count on it/on that/on this.") Those examples show inversion of a prepositional phrase, but the inversion does not necessarily occur in contexts of pied-piping. Possibly related is the phenomenon known as swipingMerchant 2002. in which a wh-phrase is inverted with a governing preposition in the context of sluicing: : Ralph was arguing, but I don't know who with. Such inversion requires pied-piping but also
ellipsis The ellipsis (, plural ellipses; from , , ), rendered , alternatively described as suspension points/dots, points/periods of ellipsis, or ellipsis points, or colloquially, dot-dot-dot,. According to Toner it is difficult to establish when t ...
, unlike Meso-American languages.


See also

*
Syntax In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...


Notes


References

* Aissen, Judith. 1996. Pied-piping, abstract agreement, and functional projections in Tzotzil. Natural language and linguistic theory 14:447-491. * Austin, Peter. 2001. Content questions in Sasak, eastern Indonesia: an OT syntax account. manuscript. University of Melbourne. * Black, Cheryl. 2000. Quiegolani Zapotec syntax: A Principles and Parameters Account. Dallas: SIL International and UT Arlington Publications in Linguistics 136. * Broadwell, George Aaron. 1999. Focus alignment and optimal order in Zapotec. Proceedings of the 35th Chicago Linguistics Society. * Broadwell, George Aaron. 2001. Optimal order and pied-piping in San Dionisio Zapotec, in Peter Sells, ed. Formal and empirical issues in optimality theory. Stanford: CSLI. * Broadwell, George Aaron. 2002. Constraint symmetry in Optimality-Theoretic Syntax. In Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King, eds. Proceedings of the Lexical Functional Grammar 2000 Conference. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. * Broadwell, George Aaron and Brook Danielle Lillehaugen. 2006. Pied-piping with inversion in Tlacolula de Matamoros Zapotec. Presented at the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, Albuquerque, Jan 2006. * Broadwell, George Aaron and Michael Parrish Key. 2004. Pied-piping with inversion in Copala Trique. Presented at the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, San Francisco, Jan 2004. * Eberhardt, Roy. 1999. Questions and inversion in Ocotepec Mixtec. Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session 43

* Heck, Fabian. 2004. A theory of pied-piping. Ph.D. thesis, University of Leipzig. * Merchant, Jason. 2002. Swiping in Germanic. In C. Jan-Wouter Zwart and Werner Abraham (eds.), Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax, 289–315. John Benjamins: Amsterdam. * van Riemsdijk, Henk. 1978. A case study in syntactic markedness: The binding nature of prepositional phrases. Foris: Dordrecht. * Sells, Peter, ed. 2001a. Formal and Empirical Issues in Optimality Theory. Stanford: CSLI. * Smith Stark, Thomas. 1988. ‘Pied-piping’ con inversion en preguntas parciales. Ms. Centro de estudios lingüísticos y literarios, Colegio de México y Seminario de lenguas indígenas. * Trechsel, Frank. 2000. A CCG Approach to Tzotzil Pied-Piping. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18: 611–63. {{colend, colwidth=26em Mesoamerican languages, P01 Indigenous languages of Central America Indigenous languages of North America Syntactic relationships Generative syntax Syntax Syntactic transformation