Lecture | Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
Head-finality, Predicate Fronting and Spell-out Domains
- Date
- Thursday 17 October 2024
- Time
- Series
- Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.01
Abstract
Tenetehára root clauses exhibit a complex subset of sentence-final particles that encode aspect, evidentiality, agreement and tense. The purpose of this talk is to argue that they are syntactic heads sitting in different positions in the inflectional spine of the sentence. As such, we will posit that the head Io is not expressed by means of a syncretic head, but by an inflectional complex comprised of several head-final functional categories. The main evidence in favor of this hypothesis concerns the fact that these various functional particles do not occupy a uniform syntactic slot. These final particles systematically occur after the predicate, thereby producing the head-final structure [[SVO]-Infl]-Infl]-Infl]-Infl]. Based on these empirical facts, the central hypothesis I will develop in this talk is that this head-final order is the result of the application of successive roll-up movements of the complement of the relevant Infl head through its specifier position. This syntactic derivation corresponds to what Travis (2000, 2005) refers to as an intraposition operation, in which several applications of complement raising proceed in a bottom-up fashion. This hypothesis conforms to our analysis that vP is not a Spell-Out domain, since vP must participate in further syntactic operations in C/T/IP phase. According to this theory, the Spell-Out of the vP is delayed until the C/T/IP phase is merged in the derivation, making the predicate fronting possible. Pursuing this line of reasoning, we will also assume that it is the presence of the unvalued [uPRED] feature on the Infl heads that force the iterative movements of the complement of the Infl heads through their specifier positions. I will then consider this intraposition operation as a typical case of externally-driven movement forced by some unvalued features on some higher Probe in the sense that it is not motivated by needs of the complement of the Infl heads. Viewed in this way, I will claim that the heads in the Infl complex carry an unvalued [uPRED] feature, which is valued by the interpretable [iPRED]-feature of the vP projection. This feature is then deleted under the AGREE operation between the Infl head and the complement that moves through its specifier. Thus, the complement of the Infl head always carries the [iPRED]-feature needed to erase and value the [uPRED]-feature of the relevant Infl head in the course of the syntactic operation. This syntactic operation explains why adjunction of the verb to a functional head in the C/IP region is entirely disallowed in Tenetehára.