Hawaiian ai at the syntax-phonology interface

Abstract

This chapter offers an explanation for the distribution of the Hawaiian particle ai. While ai has often been understood as a resumptive element in the generative literature, ai is not a pronoun and it does not have independent lexical features. The distribution of ai is such that it appears in any construction with an A-bar gap, excluding those involving local subject movement. Non-canonical word orders without ai are argued to not involve gaps, based on complementizer alternations. Given this distribution, ai is analyzed as a phonological repair for otherwise illicit linearization statements. Connecting ai to linearization explains how ai has the distribution of a resumptive pronoun despite not having lexical features. The similarities between resumption (for languages that have it) and the distribution of ai follow not from sharing the same mechanism, but from cross-linguistic properties which constrain the locality of syntactic operations.