Towards a Modular Theory of Linguistic Deficiency: Evidence From Malagasy Personal Pronouns

This paper examines the personal pronouns of Malagasy in the light of Cardinaletti and Starke's (1994) theory of linguistic deficiency. Malagasy personal pronouns surface either as independent words or as suffixes, two sets of forms which some properties identify as strong and weak, in C & S's framework. Further investigation, however, reveals that C & S's strong/weak distinction, framed in terms of the hierarchical projection of functional categories, only partially captures the properties of Malagasy pronouns. What the Malagasy data suggest is that degrees of deficiency should be distinguished from levels of deficiency. Degrees of deficiency involve the relative number of projections which constitute an expression. Levels of deficiency involve different components of linguistic theory. We argue that morphological deficiency, caused by suffixation, is independent from both phonological deficiency (caused by the lack of word-stress) and from syntactic deficiency (caused by the lack of some syntactic projection). Evidence from Malagasy further leads us to conclude, contra C & S, that syntactic deficiency does not necessarily arise from peeling off the topmost projection in a tree structure.