Syntactic Conditions on Special Inflection: Evidence from Hausa and Coptic Egyptian

This comparative study examines the morphosyntactic parameters

governing the distribution of special inflection in constituent interrogatives and focus constructions in Hausa and Coptic Egyptian. In theselanguages,relative

’tense-aspect-mood (TAM) markers occur in relativeclauses, constituent interrogatives and declarative focus constructions. However, special inflection is not a clause-typing device but is governed by syntactic conditions, since both languages also have focus/wh-constructionslacking relativeTAMs: both

languages allow in situ and ex situ focus/wh-constructions, but while Hausa

special inflection occurs in ex situ constructions, Coptic special inflection occurs in insitu constructions.A transformational copy theory analysis reduces

the parametric differences between Hausa and Coptic to different pronunciation sites of the displaced focus/wh-phrase: either the top

copy in its displaced position in the specifier of Focus Phrase (FP),

or the lower copy in its thematic position.An additional parameter

reminiscent of the Doubly-filled COMP Filter is set for Hausa to

allow both specifier and head of FP to be spelt out (pronounced)

at once, resulting in the coincidence of fronting and special inflection,

while the same parameter in Coptic is set to prohibit both  the head  and

the specifier of FP spelling out at once, ruling out the coincidence

of special inflection  and fronting.