Adnominal Modification: The View from Amis (Formosan)

Abstract: In Amis, adnominal modifying constructions share a common structural pattern involving, in particular, two suffixes, -ay and -an. Relative clauses are morphologically more complex; they abide by the subject-only rule, which triggers voice alternations to match the semantic role of the nominative pivot. Relative clauses have the same alignments as independent clauses but contain deranked verb forms. To some limited extent, some of these deranked modifying verb forms may be lexicalized as nouns; this evolution is argued to occur via headless relative clauses, resulting in stand-alone modifiers that may become entrenched as referring nouns. However, this process is distinct from productively derived lexical nouns that make use of distinct morphological processes.