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Abstract
The goal of this thesis is to develop a principled account of Hausa verbal morphology (HVM), a complex of suffixes and tone patterns that are derivational rather than inflectional. The account of HVM proposed in this dissertation is mainly based on Chomsky's (1996) Minimalist Program and Hale and Keyser's (1993) syntactic approach to argument structure.
This thesis develops a theory of verbal projections that takes VP-shells to be instantiations of different types of predicates, namely Cause Phrase and State Phrase. Tone Patterns in Hausa and auxiliary selection in Romance languages are claimed to be reflections of those types of predicates. One consequence of this theory is that the category V(erb) is seen as derivative rather than ontological.
Grammatical function changing processes are argued to involve changes between types of predicate. One such change is studied through a detailed investigation of reflexive constructions in Hausa and French. It is concluded that the phenomenon of subject dethematization observed in these constructions is the result of argument demotion, an instance of Delete $\alpha,\ \alpha$ a feature. This proposal is extended to other processes of dethematization found in passives middles, and inchoatives.
Hausa causative and cislocative constructions allow a probe into another type of grammatical function change. Here it is claimed that the complexity of many periphrastic complex-predicates is in a sense phonological, not syntactic.
Building on the conclusions reached from the study of Hausa verbal morphology, the relation between the operation MERGE and the internal features of lexical items is reconsidered. It is argued, contra Collins (1997), that, as is the case with the other operations of the computational system ATTRACT and DELETE, the operation MERGE must also be feature-driven.
Taking into account the intentional nature of language the necessity of a Numeration is derived and a proposal is made regarding some of the optional features that are added to lexical items as part of the process of forming a Numeration. The theory that emerges from this research is that of a thoroughly feature-based computational system whose operations are driven by both semantic and formal features.
