Possessors and Definiteness Effects in Two Austronesian Languages

Tw o types of definiteness effects have long been recognized in natural language and extensively investigated in English: first, the requirement that the pivot of an existential sentence be weak, illustrated in (1) (see Milsark 1977, 1979, and many others); and second, the requirement that the subject of an individual-level predicate be strong, illustrated in (2) (see e.g. Postal 1969, Carlson 1980, Diesing 1992). It is perhaps less widely known that in English, the strength or weakness of a possessed DP is determined by the strength or weakness of the possessor (Barker 2000, Rawlins 2006). One might be tempted to trace this pattern, seen in (3-4), to the syntax of DP. Because ’s possessors and determiners are in complementary distribution in English, it is not possible to determine the strength or weakness of a possessed DP by inspecting its head determiner, since there is none. Instead, the calculation is made on the basis of the possessor, which is itself a DP that can be weak or strong. The line of thought raises a question. How is the strength or weakness of possessed DP’s determined in languages in which the possessor and the head determiner are not in complementary distribution? I investigate this question in two Austronesian languages: Maori, spoken in New Zealand, and Chamorro, spoken in the Mariana Islands. These head-initia