The Syntax of =oo in Gorwaa

Gorwaa (South Cushitic, Tanzania) has an enclitic =oo that has been glossed as Topic marker in Harvey (2018: 179) although he mentions that this is not a “particularly satisfactory” term for the morpheme, since it also occurs in some “seemingly disparate morphosyntactic environments” (ibid.), e.g. comparisons, after the universal quantifier umó, nominal and adjectival negation, and on polar questions, as well as on nominal polar questions, denominally derived adjectives and deverbally derived nouns (Kerr 2020). This talk will go more deeply into the distribution of the morpheme, paying special attention to its syntax, and argue that =oo must be analysed as a C-marker of verbless predicates based on three main observations: 1) it occurs on verbless clauses; 2) it is distributed similarly to TP-external DPs; 3) it is used to mark the scope of polar-question morphology and negative morphology.