Discontinuous noun phrases in Iquito

Abstract In this paper, we provide an account of the syntactic restrictions on noun phrase discontinuity in Iquito. In Iquito, noun phrases containing determiners that have undergone movement must have a discontinuous realization where the determiner strands the noun. With moved possessive noun phrases, we find apparent pied-piping of the possessum in addition to the determiner only in case the determiner is semantically associated with the possessor. We argue that this “possessum pied-piping” is determined by the syntactic attachment height of the determiner within the noun phrase. In doing so, we provide a novel way of restricting the mechanism of distributed deletion based on configurational properties of the noun phrase, rather than some information structural or phonological property. Furthermore, we show how extending this analysis to phrase-internal syntax also allows us to derive the apparently idiosyncratic word orders we find inside NPs and PPs, thereby providing a unified account of both phrase-level and clause-level word order in Iquito.