Direct and Indirect Modification in Hocąk

Goal and Background: This paper provides evidence that Hocąk (Siouan) has direct modification, contra Helmbrecht’s (2004) claim that all adjectives in Hocąk are indirect modifiers. The data also show that lack of rigid ordering is not a reliable diagnostic for indirect modification (contra Cinque 2010). Following Sproat and Shih (1991), Cinque (2010) argues that indirect modification is higher, unordered, and in (reduced) relative clauses (RC), whereas direct modification is lower, ordered, and in APs. In Hocąk, attributive adjectives (1a) and relative clauses (1b) both occupy the same position relative to the noun and employ the same morpheme -ra, which Helmbrecht (2004) takes to be evidence that attributive adjectives are RCs. Moreover, these modifiers seem to have the status of indirect modifiers since they are unordered (2). I show that the modifiers in (1a) and (2) are APs.