Canonical Types and Noun Phrase Configuration in Fijian

This paper examines a set of observations governing the distribution of nominal expressions in Fijian clause structure. Special attention is given to the semantic types of the nouns involved, especially in establishing their patterning in the positions for the grammatical functions object and subject. The object position is shown to be more restricted in Fijian, essentially limited to proper names and certain pronominals. This asymmetry is interpreted in a type-theoretic framework as a consequence of the well-motivated syntactic asymmetry, namely that subjects take scope over objects. In sum, the two main claims put forth in this paper are:

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