UCLA

This thesis introduces and analyzes the instrumental construction in Twi, a member of the Kwa subgroup of the Niger Congo language family. I analyze novel data from native speakers and show that the instrumental construction presents two interesting puzzles. First, the morpheme associated with instrumentals, de, appears not only in instrumental constructions, but also in a particular type of indirect causative (akin to ‘let’ or ‘enable’ in English). We will see that this is an example of the cross-linguistically attested causative/applicative syncretism and can be accounted for based on properties of the verbal shell. In particular, whether or not the lexical verb necessarily projects a volitional agent determines whether a causative reading is available. The de construction also presents intriguing syntactic properties which turn out to be syntactic reflections of the decompositional nature of the verbal shell. Projections within verbal shells behave as syntactic constituents and undergo internal merge, deriving an unexpected constituent. The remnant movement I argue for to explain the Twi data correlates with previously unexplained properties of the language, including the presence of resumptive pronouns under subject A-bar movement. This thesis thus contributes both theoretically and empirically to our cross-linguistic understanding of the decomposition of verbal shells and the causative/applicative syncretism by providing and analyzing data from a language in which these two phenomena have not been previously investigated.