VP-Chaining in Oriya

VP-chaining in Oriya (an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Orissa, India) is argued to be left-recursive VP-adjunction in c-structure with a corresponding f-structure displaying recursive embedding under the attribute ADJUNCT (for 'chain-adjunct'). Under VP-chaining, 'subject sharing' is obligatory and analyzable in terms of functional control ('token sharing'), whereas 'object sharing' is not only optional but in addition, does not require case or GF uniformity, and can skip an intervening intransitive verb. It is therefore argued that 'object sharing' is a form of anaphoric control ('reference sharing'). Passivization under VP-chaining needs to apply to all verbs in the VP-chain. The uniformity of diathesis pattern is accounted for via the adoption of an LFG architecture (from Butt, Dalrymple and Frank 1997) according to which c-structure maps directly to a (rgument) structure, and a-structure in turn to f-structure. This analysis allows us to 'drive' all the aspects of VP-chaining mentioned (apart from object sharing) from an annotation of c-structure rules.