The syntactic categories of adverbials and the structural integration of complement clauses in Siwkolan Amis

Abstract This work attempts to examine the morphosyntactic properties of adverbial expressions that are realized as verbs in Siwkolan Amis, and to investigate how they are structurally represented to form adverbial verb constructions (AVCs). I shall first provide evidence to show that these adverbial expressions behave similarly to typical verbs, including: (i) occupying sentence-initial position; (ii) inflecting for voice and TAM morphology; and (iii) attracting genitive pronouns and aspectual clitics. Moreover, Amis adverbial verbs select non-finite clauses as their complements, based on raising of the subject, clitic climbing, the av -only restriction, the wide scope of negation, and the atemporality condition, which arise from the transparent clausal boundary between the matrix clause and the complement clause. I follow Wurmbrand & Shimamura’s (2017) voice restructuring system in arguing that Amis adverbial verbs are restructuring verbs that select a voice restructuring configuration consisting of Mod-AspP and deficient VoiceP, such that the clausal boundary is rendered transparent, and it is accessible to cross-boundary operations. This voice restructuring view provides implications for the typology of complement clauses in AVCs. Specifically, there is a higher degree of structural integration between the matrix and the complement clause in Amis AVCs, making the complement clause restructured as part of the matrix clause to form a mono-clausal structure of the AVCs.