A Minimalist Description of Aika Pronouns

Abstract

In Aika, there are two types of information package-able constituents based on their relevance to information structuring such as focusing, topicalization, etc. Constituents sensitive to information packaging are moveable into discourse information categories. But, those constituents that are not discourse sensitive are not relevant for information structuring, i.e. they are not frontable. Pronouns represent a cross to the division. There are pronouns moveable in focusing and the immoveable ones for the same syntactic derivation. Thus this paper investigates the pronoun types, properties and internal configuration of Aika pronouns to ascertain the distinguishing feature(s) for classifying the two types of pronoun. This study adopts feature driven Minimalist Program as the theoretical framework. The framework is based on the duo operations – operations select and merge. Data were collected from both the primary sources from the five Aika speaking communities through structured and unstructured interviews. Existing works on the language serve as the secondary sources of data collection. Three types of pronouns were identified based on their syntactic and information structural properties. The emphatic pronouns are six in numbers identified through the basic [person, number, gender] features and [+emphasis]. The unemphatic pronouns were identified through the basic features and [-emphasis]. The third type is the genitive pronoun. We observe that no one pronoun type can be derived from the other. Also, emphatic pronoun parallels other moveable DPs where fronting can be licensed while unemphatic pronouns are not. In Aika language, no constituent can be preposed to information structural layers unless it bears [+emphasis].