Verbal affixes and auxiliary verbs as manner modifiers.

The project investigates syntactic heads encoding manner information. These are potentially realised either as auxiliary verbs or bound (verbal) affixes, in contrast to adverbs, which are presumed to be the overt realisation of phrasal constituents. The primary goal is to investigate where in the functional hierarchy these syntactic heads are positioned. West Greenlandic (having bound verbal affixes encoding manner information (manner affixes)) and Puyuma and Bunun (having auxiliary verbs encoding manner information (manner adverbial verbs)) are studied in-depth and compared in order to investigate whether or not the three languages are derived from the same underlying structure. These types of manner modifiers can be used as new empirical data to test the hypothesis claiming that syntactic atoms are (sub-)morphemic units and not words. The prediction is that manner affixes and manner adverbial verbs exhibit the same distributional restrictions in relation to other syntactic heads. In order to test this prediction, I conduct fieldwork on the aforementioned languages to gather the necessary data. This project investigates the nature of syntactic atoms and it will further develop our understanding functional categories and how they can be compared across genetically and structurally different languages.