The Information Structure of Nominal Phrases and DP-internal Phrasal Movement in Buginese

Following Aboh's Split DeterminerPhrase (DP) hypothesis, this paper argues that the information structure is encoded in the syntactic structure of nominal phrase based on the linguistic data of Buginese, an Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia. As indicated by Nishiyama (1998), Buginese nominals allow a remarkable free word order: (1) a. iaro lima buku-e b. lima iaro buku-e c. lima buku-e iaro those five book-the five those book-the five book-the those d. iaro buku lima-e e. buku iaro lima-e f. buku lima-e iaro those book five-the book those five-the book five-the those According to Nishiyama's iterated DP analysis, where demonstratives project a DP and c-select another DP headed by the definite marker -e, (1a) is the underlying structure generated by the operation Merge only, whereas (1b-f) are derived by DP-internal phrasal movement. However, cross-linguistically speaking, the postulation that demonstratives project an upper DP is quite idiosyncratic. Moreover, as admitted by Nishiyama himself, the discussion of what sort of feature triggers the proposed movement is absent in his analysis. Therefore, the current paper intends to fill in this gap in terms of Chomsky's (2001, 2005) Probe-Goal approach of Minimalism. Given Aboh's (2004) Split DP hypothesis, which argues that the left periphery of nominal phrase encode the information structure in the same way as the left periphery of clause, I re-interpret Nishiyama's analysis by saying that all the examples in (1) are derived by DP-internal topicalization and/or focalization proceeded by a phrasal movement, namely the movement of Num(ber)P to the Spec(ifier) of lower DP in Nishiyama's proposal. The internal structure I propose for Buginese nominal is schematized as: (2) DtopicP>DfocusP>DtopicP> DdefiniteP>NumP>SpecificityP>nP>NP. Following Li's (1999) study on NumP and Sio's (2006) study on S(pecificity)P, I assume numerals are accommodated in SpecNumP and demonstratives are accommodated in SpecSP and moved to SpecDdefiniteP. Furthermore, I assume the optional movement as in the DP-internal topicalization or focalization is triggered by the edge feature whereas the obligatory phrasal movement such as the movement of NumP to SpecDdefiniteP is triggered by the (EPP) feature. The interaction of these two types of movements then leads to the free word order in Buginese nominal phrases shown in (1). The derivation process as mentioned is that the obligatory movement of NumP to SpecDdefiniteP takes place before the DP-internal topicalization or focalization which targets SpecDtopicP or SpecDfocusP respectively.