An Associative Semantics for Basic Sentences in Malagasy

Referent systems, originally introduced in Vermeulen (1995) as a tool for text semantics, can also be used as a tool for modeling sentential semantics. As formulated by Vermeulen, they provide a reasonable means to model the basic sentences of languages like English (where the verb sits in a medial position and can identify its arguments based on their direction) on the one hand, and languages like Korean and Tagalog on there other hand, where the verb is in a peripheral position, but each argument has distinctive morphology on or near it. They do not, however, provide a convenient means to model a language like Malagasy, where the verb is in a peripheral position and the arguments are not reliably marked with distinctive morphology. Referent systems can be modified in a straightforward way which enables them to handle not only basic Malagasy sentences, but also various other constructions, like the English double object construction.