Roots of V-to-C Movement in Romance

The paper investigates the syntactic structure of wh-clauses in late Latin. The results show that, in sentences with a wh-phrase as direct object, the interrogative operator reaches FocP in the left periphery, with the finite verb raising to the Foc head. This spec-head relation accounts for why subjects and dislocated XPs (like topics or focus elements) can not be intervening constituents between the object wh-phrase and the verb. For wh-clauses in which the interrogative operator is an adjunct, the hypothesis is that the wh-phrase occupies [Spec,IntP]. Here, the verb does not move to the CP-field, thus explaining the possibility of intervening subjects and interpolated XPs between the adjunct wh-element and the verb. These results show that the verb second (V2) property of V-to-C movement, as seen in several old Romance languages, can be derived from late Latin, and not exclusively from a supposed influence of Germanic languages, as is assumed in the literature.

Negation and Pronoun Position as a way of investigating verb movement and the emergence of do support during Early Modern English

This paper presents an analysis of the rise of do support and the gradual loss of verb movement during the period of Early Modern English. The analysis focuses on studying the structures in which do support was first used as an alternative to verb raising to I. It takes into consideration the analysis of the relationship between the position of the negation marker not in negative interrogative structures and the position of the subject and the object pronouns in these structures. The analysed structures are negative interrogatives taken from Shakespeare’s works in the period of Early Modern English. The results of the data analysis show that in most cases, there is do support when the subject pronouns are above negation, while there is no do support when object pronouns appear above negation. This suggests that do was first inserted here to avoid object raising with the verb to I or to C to avoid putting object and subject pronouns in subsequent positions.

Positive Evidence and Parameter Resetting in the Teaching of English Grammar to Libyan University Students

This study builds on Chomsky’s principles and parameters framework (Chomsky, 1986) by applying it to the study of second language (L2) acquisition. In other words, it makes use of a parameter resetting model to explain aspects of the second language learning process. It aims to investigate whether classroom instruction which presents only positive evidence, that is to say grammatically correct samples of the L2, is sufficient to enable adult second language learners to acquire certain properties of L2 parameters which differ from their mother tongue (L1). The participants in the study have Arabic as their L1, and are learning English as an L2. The study hypothesizes that the participants, who are all adult students studying English language at an advanced level in Misurata University, Libya, will not be able to reset the pro-drop parameter and the verb raising parameter from their properties in Arabic to their different properties in English. The hypothesized reason is that they are taught using only positive evidence-based samples of English, and that is not sufficient to lead to parameter resetting. The results show that the students had great difficulty in resetting the pro-drop parameter and the verb raising parameter from Arabic to English.

PP-Extraposition and the Order of Adverbials in English

In English, adverbials may intervene between the verb and a selected PP. We consider three analyses of this fact: the traditional account, that the PP shifts rightward across a right-adjoined adverbial ( Stowell 1981 ); an alternative account, that the verb moves leftward across a left-adjoined adverbial ( Pesetsky 1989 , Johnson 1991 ); and a hybrid account that assumes both extraposition and verb raising. We argue that the order of postverbal adverbials favors the extraposition analysis, provided this analysis is combined with the hypothesis that certain adverbials can directly modify other adverbials ( Rohrbacher 1994 , Williams 2014 ). We then compare two instantiations of the extraposition analysis: the traditional account and an antisymmetric account that emulates PP-extraposition through a combination of PP-intraposition and roll-up movement. While close to being notational variants, these accounts can be teased apart using the very strict locality requirement that holds of interaction with temporal only. The data then show that the symmetric account has the edge. Finally, we briefly discuss the implications of our findings for the analysis of the English VP, with a focus on the circumstances under which the verb moves.

Null Objects in Korean: Experimental Evidence for the Argument Ellipsis Analysis

Null object (NO) constructions in Korean and Japanese have received different accounts: as (a) argument ellipsis ( Oku 1998 , S. Kim 1999 , Saito 2007 , Sakamoto 2015 ), (b) VP-ellipsis after verb raising ( Otani and Whitman 1991 , Funakoshi 2016 ), or (c) instances of base-generated pro ( Park 1997 , Hoji 1998 , 2003 ). We report results from two experiments supporting the argument ellipsis analysis for Korean. Experiment 1 builds on K.-M. Kim and Han’s (2016) finding of interspeaker variation in whether the pronoun ku can be bound by a quantifier. Results showed that a speaker’s acceptance of quantifier-bound ku positively correlates with acceptance of sloppy readings in NO sentences. We argue that an ellipsis account, in which the NO site contains internal structure hosting the pronoun, accounts for this correlation. Experiment 2, testing the recovery of adverbials in NO sentences, showed that only the object (not the adverb) can be recovered in the NO site, excluding the possibility of VP-ellipsis. Taken together, our findings suggest that NOs result from argument ellipsis in Korean.

Verb-raising and VP-fronting in Japanese

It is challenging to make empirical arguments either for or against the existence of verb-raising in head-final languages like Japanese since word order facts are not informative in such languages unlike in head-initial languages such as English and French. This article aims to make a novel argument for the existence of verb-raising in Japanese, based on facts about VP-fronting.

Clitic Climbing, the Raising-Control Dichotomy and Diaphasic Variation in Croatian

In the paper, we discuss the phenomenon of clitic climbing (CC) out of infinitive complements in contemporary Croatian. Based on the first theoretical work and some empirical findings on CC in Czech and Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian (BCS) and the observation that differences in CC linked to register have been reported for some languages, we elaborate on the claim that CC varies in respect of both register and the Raising-Control Dichotomy. The following research questions are addressed: Does clitic climbing out of the single infinitive in Croatian depend on the type of complement-taking predicate (CTP) with respect to the Raising-Control Distinction? Does CC appear with equal frequency in standard and colloquial Croatian if the type of CTP verb (Raising vs Control) as a variable remains constant? Our study is based on data for two types of complement-taking predicates: a) Raising (8 different verbs) and b) Subject Control (8 non-reflexive + 8 reflexive verbs). The data was extracted from the Forum subcorpus of hrWaC v2.2 and from the Croatian Language Repository and Croatian National Corpus. Our data suggest that not only the Raising-Control Dichotomy, but also diaphasic variation have an impact on CC from infinitive complements.

Voice Mismatch Tolerance in Verb Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis

Verb Phrase Ellipsis, in particular, is taken to be very rare in languages other than English. However, recent literature has pointed out that a Verb Phrase Ellipsis-like construction does in fact exist in other languages, but may be masked due to the fact that the main verb raises to INFL in such languages, a process known as Verb Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VSVPE). This paper addresses two main issues: 1) whether such a construction in Hebrew patterns with VPE in English or with Pseudogapping; via an examination of voice mismatch tolerance following Merchant (2013) 2) After establishing that Hebrew is a VSVPE language and controlling for external variables such as independent object drop, this paper tests which constituent in particular is targeted in the ellipsis process. It is concluded that VSVPE languages target vP for ellipsis, not VP, nor PP, as opposed to recent accounts. In other words, they pattern with Pseudogappig in including higher constituents (vP, not VP) in the ellipsis) more than they do with VPE. Other Verb-Raising to INFL languages are predicted to behave similarly with respect to which constituent is targeted for ellipsis.

A new and challenging view on verb clustering*

This review article discusses Lotte Dros-Hendriks’ PhD thesis Not another book on Verb Raising (2018). A ground-breaking book, as it provides a simple, principled account for the geographical distribution of the various word orders found in so-called ‘verb’ clusters in the Dutch dialects. It will be shown, however, that the account is based on a number of controversial and insufficiently motivated premises. This article raises a number of potential problems for these premises, which should find a satisfactory solution before we can wholeheartedly adopt the core insights provided by this interesting work.