Existentials and Partitives in Malagasy
AbstractThis article discusses the existential construction in Malagasy, focussing on the distribution and interpretation of nominals. It is argued that the existential construction involves the raising of specific NPs out of the small clause complement of the existential verb misy. Nonspecific NPs, on the other hand, are shown to remain within the complement. That raising correlates with interpretation provides evidence in favour of the Mapping Hypothesis of Diesing (1992). Although the syntactic analysis accounts for the specific/nonspecific distribution in the existential construction, it leaves unexplained the precise interpretation of the specific NP, which may be either partitive, possessive, or locative. This article therefore argues for a relation, PARTITIVE, which unites these three readings.