Search

Societal Impact Statement Summary Debates about the impacts of human settlement on Madagascar's habitat have missed the Malagasy perspective. Using indigenous and local knowledge in the form of toponyms, we find many regions across today's treeless grasslands are named after forest/trees, suggesting they may be novel. Where observed habitat does not match toponyms, erosion is significantly more likely at landscape scales. This suggests rapid expansion of erosion following human removal and burning of endemic forest, savanna woodland, heathland and grass assemblages. Findings also provide a timely warning: current practices may be unsustainable and may impact not only biodiversity but also human wellbeing unless urgently addressed. The debate surrounding the extent of Madagascar's treeless grasslands at human settlement is important because introduced disturbance can negatively impact the biodiversity and productivity of systems that evolved under different regimes. Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK), often overlooked, can provide information about past vegetation structure. To test whether clearance of forest and trees, frequent fires and pasture preparation have accelerated today's island‐wide erosion, we use vegetation toponyms and assess whether mismatches between these and current vegetation types are significantly more likely to be associated with erosion. Using Malagasy and Imerina linguistic records spanning 150 years, we mapped forest‐related and grassland‐related extensive toponyms in current grassland and forest, respectively. We then assessed whether remotely‐sensed erosion was more likely when toponyms and current habitat did not match. We found 316 sites in treeless grasslands, named after forest/clusters of trees, but no grassland‐named sites in forest. Globally, natural forest and grasslands both constrain erosion. Forest toponyms in grassland were significantly more likely to reflect erosion than sites in extant forest. These findings concur with palaeoecological, geomorphological, molecular and rangeland palatability studies. Malagasy ILK, hitherto largely ignored as a source of information, strongly suggests vegetation clearance and human disturbance have exacerbated the degradation of terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems through topsoil loss and siltation and selected fire‐adapted, less‐palatable grasslands. Malagasy ILK in the form of toponyms highlights the need to address the negative impacts of burning and land‐clearance practices (e.g., loss of biodiversity and ecological function, decreased agricultural productivity, collapsed fisheries), given island‐wide challenges to food security and conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Societal Impact Statement Plants and agricultural practices are an integral part of human food systems and well‐being. Here, an example of an ethnobotanical research approach is provided to increase our understanding of the relationship between plants and human activities in Madagascar, where the agricultural sector is the local economy basis. This research examines weeds of the Poaceae family, assessing their recognition and societal impacts, and quantifying farmers' perception of the Poaceae weed's status in cropping systems. A better understanding of farmers' weed knowledge will strengthen our ability to inclusively support rural highland Malagasy food systems, incorporating science with traditional knowledge. Summary Research on the perceptions and knowledge of Poaceae weeds was conducted in three areas of Madagascar's central highlands: Itremo massif, Ambohidray village and Vakinankaratra region. This work aims to identify the best‐known species and understand their roles in crop and livestock systems. Additionally, it presents detailed data on Digitaria species. The approach was based on field surveys and farmer's interviews, with plant voucher specimens and photographs to facilitate identification. Relative frequency of citations, confidence interval, and use values indexes were calculated to assess cultural significance. We carried out 111 interviews, where 87 taxa were mentioned, of which 51 are Poaceae, including 11 Digitaria species. Farmers classify the Poaceae weeds in three ways: their impacts on agricultural activities, use category and vegetative growth patterns, the latter especially significant for Digitaria. Locally common grasses are perceived as weeds when they are abundant and cause yield loss. The most damaging species is Digitaria humbertii, confirmed by half of the interviews. More than 40% of the farmers use Poaceae weeds in composting, more than 20% as fodder, and more than 8% as medicine. Overall, 67% of the species mentioned are judged useful. The diversity of useful species and the associated indigenous knowledge is important to the local communities, but, weeds are still perceived as negative generally. The Poaceae are overall neglected in Malagasy ethnobotany, and an in‐depth analysis of farmer knowledge is needed. The data obtained will be useful for future studies and the conservation of agrobiodiversity, especially endemic species that are not widely known.

Societal Impact Statement: Plants and agricultural practices are an integral part of human food systems and well‐being. Here, an example of an ethnobotanical research approach is provided to increase our understanding of the relationship between plants and human activities in Madagascar, where the agricultural sector is the local economy basis. This research examines weeds of the Poaceae family, assessing their recognition and societal impacts, and quantifying farmers' perception of the Poaceae weed's status in cropping systems. A better understanding of farmers' weed knowledge will strengthen our ability to inclusively support rural highland Malagasy food systems, incorporating science with traditional knowledge. Summary: Research on the perceptions and knowledge of Poaceae weeds was conducted in three areas of Madagascar's central highlands: Itremo massif, Ambohidray village and Vakinankaratra region. This work aims to identify the best‐known species and understand their roles in crop and livestock systems. Additionally, it presents detailed data on Digitaria species.The approach was based on field surveys and farmer's interviews, with plant voucher specimens and photographs to facilitate identification. Relative frequency of citations, confidence interval, and use values indexes were calculated to assess cultural significance.We carried out 111 interviews, where 87 taxa were mentioned, of which 51 are Poaceae, including 11 Digitaria species. Farmers classify the Poaceae weeds in three ways: their impacts on agricultural activities, use category and vegetative growth patterns, the latter especially significant for Digitaria. Locally common grasses are perceived as weeds when they are abundant and cause yield loss. The most damaging species is Digitaria humbertii, confirmed by half of the interviews. More than 40% of the farmers use Poaceae weeds in composting, more than 20% as fodder, and more than 8% as medicine.Overall, 67% of the species mentioned are judged useful. The diversity of useful species and the associated indigenous knowledge is important to the local communities, but, weeds are still perceived as negative generally. The Poaceae are overall neglected in Malagasy ethnobotany, and an in‐depth analysis of farmer knowledge is needed. The data obtained will be useful for future studies and the conservation of agrobiodiversity, especially endemic species that are not widely known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pseudosluicing diagnostics have played an important role in wider debates about sluicing. Sluicing is the term used to describe the deletion of an embedded clausal constituent, which leaves only a wh‐phrase overt. Genuine sluicing requires syntactic or semantic identity between the sluiced clause and its antecedent, contrasting with pseudosluicing, in which pro‐drop creates the appearance of a sluice but no identity is required. The underlying structure of sluicing in several Austronesian languages has been argued to be pseudoclefts, which involve a nominal wh‐predicate and a headless relative clause argument. Both Malagasy and Nukuoro have been analysed as having pseudocleft sluicing, and on the basis of this, claims about the type of identity required in sluicing have been made. Both analyses rely on diagnostics that rule out the possibility of pseudosluicing. This paper reexamines the pseudosluicing diagnostics used for Malagasy and Nukuoro and concludes that they have been insufficiently controlled for. This is supported by data from Madurese showing that pseudosluicing diagnostics are inconclusive in these Austronesian languages. Language‐internal support is needed for such diagnostics, especially as they play an important role in the conclusions drawn from Austronesian languages on the wider identity requirement for sluicing. Three language‐specific diagnostics are given which are successfully able to identify pseudosluicing in Madurese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no consensus in the literature on the analysis of phrasal comparatives. Both reduced clause analyses, in which the standard phrase contains elided clausal structure, and direct analyses, in which the standard of comparison is a direct complement to the standard marker, have been proposed. This paper argues for a direct analysis of the phrasal comparative in Malagasy, an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Madagascar. Evidence for the direct analysis comes from the lack of overt clausal comparatives, Binding Theory, scope, and Malagasy‐specific characteristics of the standard. The conclusion contributes to the rapidly expanding picture of cross‐linguistic variation in comparative syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malagasy demonstratives appear simultaneously initially and finally within the DP and must be identical: ity boky ity ‘DEM book DEM’ “this book”. We argue that the unusual doubling pattern arises from multiple pronunciation of a single demonstrative formative and not from base-generation of two independent formatives. The primary goal is to show that doubling, which has been amply discussed in the verbal domain, particularly in the literature on verb doubling in predicate clefts, also occurs in the nominal domain and can be successfully analyzed with existing theoretical machinery.

Copyright of Biotropica is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The tribe Sonerileae in tropical Africa and Madagascar is a morphologically diverse lineage that consists of 239 species in 10 genera. In this study, we present the first in‐depth phylogenetic analysis of African Sonerileae to test monophyly of the currently recognized genera. Phylogenetic analyses were performed using sequence data from two nuclear (nrITS and nrETS) and three plastid loci (accD‐psaI, ndhF and psbK‐psbL). Sampling consisted of 140 accessions including 64 African, 27 Malagasy, 46 Asian, and three neotropical Sonerileae together with a broad outgroup sampling (105 spp.). Phylogenetic relationships were inferred using maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference approaches, and a careful reassessment of morphological characters was carried out. Our results neither support the monophyly of the Old World nor African Sonerileae. The monospecific African genus Benna is partially supported as sister to Phainantha, one of the basal neotropical lineages, while African and Malagasy Medinilla are nested among the SE Asian genera. Gravesia (116 spp.), the most species‐rich and morphologically diverse genus in Madagascar, is recovered as monophyletic. The African genera of Sonerileae Calvoa, Dicellandra, and Preussiella form well‐supported clades. In contrast, Amphiblemma (including Amphiblemma molle) and Cincinnobotrys s.l. (including Cincinnobotrys felicis) are not monophyletic. To accommodate the caulescent C. felicis we propose reinstatement of the monospecific genus Bourdaria. For the distinctive A. molle a new genus Mendelia is described. Calvoa hirsuta is designated here as the type of genus Calvoa, lectotypes are designated for Medinilla engleri and Veprecella lutea, and a neotype is designated for Preussiella kamerunensis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lemurs are endemic to the island of Madagascar, a biodiversity hotspot that is considered one of the world’s poorest countries. To understand how Malagasy and non-Malagasy perceive lemur conservation programs, we surveyed 331 people and compared the results of four audience groups: Malagasy conservation professionals, Malagasy not working in conservation, non-Malagasy conservation professionals, and non-Malagasy not working in conservation. We hoped to learn if Malagasy and non-Malagasy agree about lemur conservation priorities, if there are conservation threats and solutions that may be poorly prioritized due to disagreement about their importance, and what topics should be prioritized by conservation education programs. The four groups of survey respondents agreed that lemurs and people should be prioritized equally; disagreed about the importance of hunting, charcoal production, and logging as threats; and agreed about the importance of education for Malagasy people, reforestation, and patrolling forests as solutions. While they were interested in different topics related to lemur conservation, all would like to learn more about how threats facing lemurs are being addressed. Malagasy respondents were also interested in climate change and conservation technology, and non-Malagasy were also interested in Malagasy people working in conservation, conservation success stories, and conservation organizations working in Madagascar. More research is needed to fully understand how Malagasy and non-Malagasy perceptions are similar and different on a large scale and in specific regions, and how this impacts lemur conservation priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an account of N-bonding in Malagasy, a predicate-initial Austronesian language of Madagascar. N-bonding refers to a morphological process in which material from nominal arguments is morphologically bound to certain heads (Keenan 2000). I argue that N-bonding can be analyzed as a reflection of head-head adjunction configurations which can be derived in Malagasy through Local Dislocation (Embick & Noyer 2007; Levin 2015; Erlewine 2018), a post-syntactic operation that yields a complex head. Following Levin 2015, I assume that Local Dislocation is implemented in Malagasy due to licensing constraints. More specifically, I show that N-bonding occurs in all constructions in which an argument cannot be licensed by the structural mechanisms available in the language. The resulting head-head configuration then feeds a language- specific morphophonological operation that inserts a bundle of features which surface as the N-bonding element. This approach not only accounts for the distribution of N-bonding and is consistent with the observed phonological patterns, but also offers an alternative view of underlying clausal structure and voice morphology in Malagasy.

Ellipsis is restricted by an identity condition such that elided material must be identical in some fashion to a linguistic antecedent. The traditional view is that this requirement is syntactic in nature. Merchant, in 2001, however, proposed that the identity condition is fundamentally semantic, leading to a substantive debate in the ellipsis literature. Potsdam, in 2007, used the sluicing construction in Malagasy to argue for Merchant's semantic licensing condition; however, since that work, at least two alternative analyses of sluicing constructions in other Austronesian languages, Nukuoro and Malay/Indonesian, have been proposed that are potentially compatible with a syntactic identity condition. This paper considers those analyses for Malagasy and shows that they are untenable. Malagasy sluicing requires that the antecedent and the elided clause need not be syntactically identical. It thus continues to support a non-syntactic identity condition on ellipsis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In languages that have a definite article but no indefinite article, the definite article typically maps to definites, and the bare noun maps to indefinites. We investigate this mapping in Malagasy, which imposes an additional restriction: bare nouns cannot be subjects. We ask whether the subject can be interpreted as indefinite, given the obligatory nature of the article. We also look at DPs in other positions (direct object, clefted subjects) to determine whether the mapping between form and meaning is one-to-one. To answer these questions, we administered an on-line questionnaire that presented participants with the choice of the article or the bare noun in the different positions (subject, object, cleft) in contexts that favoured an indefinite/novel interpretation. As predicted, the article was obligatory in subject position, but disfavoured in the object and cleft position. These results confirm current descriptions in the literature. We compare these results with a similar case of definite article in indefinite nominals found in Italian and propose that the article does not carry definiteness features (at least in these cases) but overtly marks (abstract) Case assignment on subjects, while it can remain silent on objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In highland Madagascar, people often let social relations drift into a 'dormant' state. Within this state, people refrain not only from interaction, but also from further defining the nature of social relations. This 'dormant' state, which may last for a considerable time, reflects cultural norms of social interaction and, as this article argues, needs to be considered when aiming for a better grasp of the mechanisms upon which social relatedness in highland Madagascar is based. So far, social organisation in highland Madagascar has generally been described as highly pragmatic, situational and generally 'fluid' in nature. By ethnographically exploring the social dynamics of music bands in Antananarivo, I will show how it is due to a widespread reluctance to deal with conflict directly that social relations drift into a rather vaguely defined mode referred to by Malagasy musicians as 'on standby'. The article aims to contribute a processual perspective to the situational structure of relatedness and, in doing so, provides an explanation for the more general atmosphere of mistrust which has recently been considered to characterise social relations in Madagascar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented wherein the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics about Malagasy socio-cultural world from the perspective of relationality in Madagascar.

Among the most explicit ideas and norms of desired, pro-social behaviours in modern Malagasy society is the rhetoric around, and longing for, 'fihavanana', a term that can be roughly translated as 'solidarity'. It features therefore as a very prominent aspect of relationality in Madagascar, serving as a means of control and of conflict resolution and also as a guarantee of peace. Yet there is another, very different, dimension to fihavanana that is waiting to be uncovered, which this article aims to highlight. It is in fact a battle term, coined to negotiate issues of modernity and identity. My analysis will show that the concept of 'Malagasy solidarity' ('fihavanana gasy') has its roots not in problems of violence or war but in the experience of deep social rupture produced by confrontation with European concepts of enlightenment, rationality, Christianity and secularity during the 19th century. Fears of a consequent threat to authentic Malagasy culture led, from the first half of the 20th century onwards, to the development of a new, powerful discourse on the need to recover true Malagasy values, and 'solidarity' was among the most prominent of those selected. This ongoing discourse and the trend towards the institutionalisation of a concept of relatedness like Malagasy solidarity should thus be understood and reframed within an identitarian logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the semantic and pragmatic functions of voice in the Central dialects of Malagasy through quantitative and qualitative analyses of a set of oral narratives. Analysis of semantic transitivity parameters and discourse topicality reveals a preserved but weakened connection between nonactor voice and high transitivity and actor voice and intransitivity. Both actor voice and nonactor voice constructions have an active–transitive function; antipassive and passive functions are achieved, respectively, by omitting the patient in actor voice or the agent in nonactor voice. Patterns of anaphoric argument omission show that the pivot position has grammaticalized as the locus of high topicality arguments, paving the way for transition from a transitivity- dominated to a thematicity-dominated language. Thus, despite the morphological conservatism of the Central Malagasy voice system, it shows significant functional divergence from the most conservative Philippine-type systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In South and Central Kalimantan (southern Borneo) there are some unusual linguistic features shared among languages which are adjacent but do not belong to the same genetic linguistic subgroups. These languages are predominantly Banjar Malay (a Malayic language), Ngaju (a West Barito language), and Ma’anyan (a Southeast Barito language). The same features also appear to some degree in Malagasy, a Southeast Barito language in East Africa. The shared linguistic features are the following ones: a grammaticalized form of the originally Malay noun buah ‘fruit’ expressing affectedness, nasal spreading in which N- not only nasalizes the onset of the first syllable but also a *y in the next syllable, a non-volitional marker derived from the Banjar Malay prefix combination ta-pa- (related to Indonesian tər- + pər-), and the change from Proto Malayo-Polynesian *s to h (or Malagasy Ø). These features have their origins in the various members of the language configuration outlined above and form a Sprachbund or “Linguistic Area”. The concept of Linguistic Area is weak and difficult to define. Lyle Campbell (2002) considers it little else than borrowing or diffusion and writes it off as “no more than [a] post hoc attempt [...] to impose geographical order on varied conglomerations of [...] borrowings”. While mindful of its shortcomings, the current author still uses the concept as a useful tool to distinguish betweeninherited and borrowed commonalities. In the configuration of languages currently under discussion it also provides a better understanding of the linguistic situation in South Borneo at a time prior to the Malagasy migrations to East Africa (some thirteen centuries ago).

Extraposition is the non-canonical placement of dependents in a right-peripheral position in a clause. The Austronesian language Malagasy has basic VOXS word order, however, extraposition leads to VOSX. Extraposed constituents behave syntactically as though they were in their undisplaced position inside the predicate at both LF and Spell Out. This paper argues that extraposition is achieved via movement at Phonological Form (PF). I argue against alternatives that would derive extraposition with syntactic A' movement or stranding analyses. Within a Minimalist model of grammar, movement operations take place on the branch from Spell Out to PF and have only phonological consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rising micronutrient deficiencies threaten the well-being of preschool-aged children, as is the case for disadvantaged farmers in Madagascar. However, effective interventions to improve their nutritional status are still unknown. This study investigates the disjointed link between agriculture - food/nutrition security and food/nutrition security - nutritional status through a dual approach. Using a panel dataset, our result supports the link between production diversity - dietary diversity, and dietary diversity - improvement in children's wasting. Importantly, the finding highlights an association of own production of pulse with energy/micronutrient intake and that of energy/zinc intake with the reduction of undernourished and stunted child, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much of the literature on recipe contexts has focused on English and the availability of null definite patients, this paper shows that both null agents and null patients are possible in recipes in a range of typologically and genetically diverse languages. It is proposed that null agents in recipes arise due to a variety of syntactic strategies, but null patients are uniformly licensed via a null topic in the left periphery in all the languages considered. These results indicate that while the recipe register does not directly dictate specific syntactic structures such as imperatives or null objects, the register can provide the pragmatic context necessary for certain syntactic processes, such as null topicalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an analysis of the paremias of Russian, French, Malagasy and Spanish, devoted to women. The research material was the paremiological units of these languages, obtained by continuous sampling from collections of paremias, works of art and bilingual dictionaries, the selection criterion is the presence of a woman’s lexical unit (French femme , Spanish mujer , Malagasy Vehivavy ) or a description of appearance, significance, behavior function as mother, wife, housewife, etc. in paremias in considered linguocultures. The purpose of the study is to reveal the universal and cultural-specific features of the concept of a woman in the considered corps of the Russian, French Malagasy and Spanish paremies. The tasks of the work also include consideration of the peculiarities of the paremiological and lexical units used in this fragment of the linguistic picture, as well as to describe the general and non-coinciding aspects of the origin and functioning of the antiparemia and the use of gradualness in the paremies. The selection and analysis of paremiological units showed that in the languages in question one can find paremic units characterizing a woman as ideal, intelligent, strong, etc. person, and also the importance of a woman as a housewife and her superiority over a man. A significant part of the analyzed linguistic material is made up of paradoxes in which a woman is compared with a female animal, a plant or object with which a certain quality of a woman is associated, and also a woman is presented as a stupid, talkative, unreliable, lazy, capricious person or unreasonable wife. The originality of the research is that the first time the analysis of the comparative consideration of the paremias about the woman on the material of the Russian, French, Malagasy and Spanish languages and the lexical and paremiological material of the Malagasy language introduced into the scientific circulation is made.

In languages that have a definite article but no indefinite article, the definite article typically maps to definites, and the bare noun maps to indefinites. We investigate this mapping in Malagasy, which imposes an additional restriction: bare nouns cannot be subjects. We ask whether the subject can be interpreted as indefinite, given the obligatory nature of the article. We also look at DPs in other positions (direct object, clefted subjects) to determine whether the mapping between form and meaning is one-to-one. To answer these questions, we administered an on-line questionnaire that presented participants with the choice of the article or the bare noun in the different positions (subject, object, cleft) in contexts that favoured an indefinite/novel interpretation. As predicted, the article was obligatory in subject position, but disfavoured in the object and cleft position. These results confirm current descriptions in the literature. We compare these results with a similar case of definite article in indefinite nominals found in Italian and propose that the article does not carry definiteness features (at least in these cases) but overtly marks (abstract) Case assignment on subjects, while it can remain silent on objects.

In Nour, 1947, Jean-Luc Raharimanana recounts the 1947 Malagasy Uprising, when France killed 89,000 Malagasy combatants and civils to repress their struggle for independence and political sovereignty. As the novel dramatizes colonial exactions, it particularly emphasizes the complex relationship of subalternized populations with their stolen land. A natural and symbiotic environment sacred for the natives, a soil exhaustible for the settlers, the land is conceptualized as a mythical female-like entity to suggest the concomitant violation and devastation of human beings and lands for extraction and exploitation. While scholars have insisted on the genocidal writing of Raharimanana, the nature of the writing of Nour, 1947 is as much genocidal as it is ecocidal. Taking on a gendered approach to the land, Raharimanana's ecocidal writing, I argue, reclaims the concept of "mère patrie" to envision the history of Madagascar outside the phallocentric and patriarchal dynamics undergirding both French and Malagasy versions of the 1947 Uprising. A set of aesthetic and discursive strategies that perform the violence against fragile human-nature ecosystems, the author's ecocidal writing particularly mobilizes rot, putrefaction, and bodily dejections, to expose and repair the unscarred wound at the heart of the concept of "mère patrie," desacralized by both colonialists and Malagasy independentists and nationalists across the second half of the twentieth century. Ultimately, the novel questions the relevance of land myths in the context of twenty-first-century globalization and Malagasy politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the medical pluralism related to healers of the incurable and therapeutical treatment in Madagascar. It discusses Malagasy medical system which involves biomedicine and church therapies in the treatment of diseases. It highlights the religio-therapeutic context related to incurable disease.

Crop wild relatives are important but often poorly known. This is the case for subtribe Saccharinae (Poaceae: Andropogoneae), which includes sugarcane (Saccharum) and sorghum (Sorghum). We present a phylogenetic and taxonomic account of the Malagasy endemic genus Lasiorhachis, previously included in Saccharum. New plastome and nuclear sequences were assembled from genome skimming data. Phylogenetic analyses of whole plastomes place Lasiorhachis as sister to Sorghum and only distantly related to the interbreeding Saccharum complex. This is also supported by analyses of nuclear ITS and partial assemblies for eight low-copy regions. Some nuclear regions suggest that Lasiorhachis is closer to Sorghum section Sorghum than other Sorghum spp. sometimes segregated as Vacoparis. We present a full taxonomic treatment of Lasiorhachis with an identification key, synonymy, typification, descriptions, drawings and a distribution map of the three species, all endemic to the central highlands of Madagascar. Lasiorhachis species occupy contrasting ecological niches and at least one of them, L. viguieri, has significance for ecosystem function. As crop wild relatives of sorghum, Lasiorhachis species should be included in germplasm collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss the acquisition of the voicing system of Malagasy, an Austronesian language. Our study is based on the longitudinal data of three children ages 19-32 months, and is to our knowledge the first systematic investigation of the acquisition of Malagasy. The Malagasy voicing system has a distinctive morphology and involves the promotion of an argument (actor, theme, instrument, etc.) to a referentially and syntactically prominent position, typically clause-final. We look at two competing accounts of the Malagasy voicing system, one in which the promoted argument is analyzed as a subject and the promotion operation an instance of A-movement (Guilfoyle, Hung, & Travis, 1992) and a more recent account in which Malagasy is analyzed as a V2-like language in which the promoted argument is a topic and the promotion an instance of A'-movement (Pearson, M. (2001); Pearson, M. 2005)). Both analyses have clear implications for acquisition, which we examine in this paper. Our acquisition results favor the analysis of the promoted argument as an A'-element. We also show that there is a developmental stage in Malagasy that parallels the root infinitive (RI) stage widely observed in various European languages. Apparent differences between the Germanic RIs and the analogous phenomenon in Malagasy are derived from differences in the functional structure associated with a voicing system as opposed to an agreement system.