This study aims to provide a formal discussion on some of the fundamental mechanisms of Monsang syntax, namely Case, Agreement, and Negation. Following a thorough description of the distribution of these integral mechanisms in Monsang syntax, it provides a theoretical analysis within the framework of the Minimalist Program of Chomsky (1993; 1995; 2000) and other scholars who have worked on these topics.

Monsang is an ergative-absolutive language and it exhibits morphological ergativity. The study finds that the ergative marking in Monsang is determined by syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and high agency verbs. Following Souza (2017), I argue that the postpositional ergative is assigned by a postposition itself to the transitive subject in Spec vP, while nominative is checked by T and accusative by v.

Monsang has both preverbal and postverbal subject agreement. On the projection of agreement, I argued that there are two functional categories of Agr, namely Agrs and Agro (cf. Chomsky 1993). The Spec of Agrs is where the subject finally surfaces after it has been moved up due to the EPP feature of AgrsP. The Agrs is occupied by the subject agreement, whereas the Agro is occupied by the object agreement.

In Monsang, negation occurs as a morphological category, as suffixed to the finite verb or as a negative word. The post-verbal occurrence of the negative marker marks the sentential negation, whereas the negative word immediately following the constituent it negates marks the constituent negation. In addition, it describes two types of NPIs: wh-NPIs and q-NPIs. They can occur both in a local and long-distance licensing domain. The licensing condition is followed by feature checking, where the negative marker values the uninterpretable negative features on the NPI. Thus, the NPI becomes legitimate to occur in the negative clause.