ON THE CORRELATION BETWEEN MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX:
THE CASE OF V-TO-I*
Artemis Alexiadou & Gisbert Fanselow
U.Potsdam/AUTH & U.Potsdam
artemis/[email protected]
Abstract
In this paper we revisit V-to-I-movement in Germanic and beyond. We examine and evaluate
the hypothesis that there is a correlation between richness of verbal inflectional morphology
and the obligatory movement of the finite verb to Infl, which has been adopted in much recent
literature. We show that this hypothesis is empirically inadequate, and that in fact V-to-I
movement across languages is independent of morphology.
We formulate an explanation for the observable tendencies/links between syntactic movement
and morphological richness by considering how inflectional morphology arises, how verb
second (V2) languages transform into non-V2 SVO-languages, and how V-to-I-movement
can get lost in the history of a language.
1. V-to-I movement and word order variation
It has been proposed that SVO languages fall into two groups when one considers the relative
order of the finite verb and a ‘low’ adverb, which is taken to mark the left edge of the VP. In
languages such as Icelandic, the finite verb in a subordinate clause obligatorily precedes such
adverbs (2), while in languages such as English, the finite verb obligatorily follows these
adverbs (3) (Data from Vikner 1995b).
(1)
a.
b.
S V Adv O -> Icelandic, French, Italian
S Adv V O -> English, Danish, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish
(2)
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
En.
Da.
Fa.
Ic.
Fr.
It.
That John [VP often eats tomatoes surprises most people
At Johan [VP ofte spiser tomater overrasker de fleste
At Jón [VP ofta etur tomatir kemur óvart á tey flestu
*Að Jonas [VP oft borðar tómata kemu flestum á óvart
*Que Jean [VP souvent mange des tomates surprend tout le monde
*Gianni [VP spesso mangia pomodori
(3)
a.
b.
c.
En.
Da.
Fa.
*That John eats [VP often tomatoes surprises most people
*At Johan spiser [VP ofte tomater overrasker de fleste
*At Jón etur ofta [VP tomatir kemur óvart á tey flestu1
*
The present paper is a slightly revised and enlarged version of a talk we presented at the Germanic Syntax
Workshop in Groningen, May 2000. For comments and helpful suggestions, we thank Karin Donhauser,
Caroline Féry, Susann Fischer, Tonjes Veenstra, and Sten Vikner. The research reported here was partially
supported by DFG grants INK 12/B1 to the Innovationskolleg "Formale Modelle Kognitiver Komplexität", and
to the Forschergruppe "Konfligierende Regeln", both at the University of Potsdam.
d.
e.
f.
Ic.
Fr.
It.
Að Jonas borðar [VP oft tómata kemu flestum á óvart
Que Jean mange [VP souvent des tomates surprend tout le monde
Gianni mangia [VP spesso pomodori
Under the assumption that in both language groups the adverb is attached at the same site (see
e.g. Alexiadou 1997, Cinque 1999 for recent discussion), this pattern suggests that in the first
group the verb has undergone head movement to (at least) Infl, while in the second group the
verb remains in VP (Emonds 1976, Travis 1984, and Pollock 1989) among others).
Another difference between these two language groups concerns their verbal inflectional
paradigms. In French, Italian, and Icelandic, on the one hand, verbs are marked for a range of
distinctions for person and number, while in English and Danish this is not the case.
(4)
Danish
høre 'hear'
jeg hører
du hører
han hører
vi hører
I hører
de hører
English
Past Tense walk
I walk-ed
you walk-ed
he walk-ed
we walked
you walk-ed
they walked
(5)
Italian
sentire 'hear'
io sent-o
tu sent-i
lui sent-e
noi sent-iamo
voi sent-ite
loro sent-ono
French
Past tense marcher
je march-ais
tu march-ais
il march-ait
nou march-ions
vous march-iez
ils march-aient
Icelandic
kasta 'throw'
eg kasta
þú kasta-r
hann kasta-r
við köst-um
þið kast-ið
þeir kasta
The above observations have led to the proposal that the presence of rich inflectional
morphology is responsible for the presence of overt V-to-I movement in a language.
Kosmeijer (1986) presents the first attempt in the generative literature to establish such a link
between V-to-I movement and the relevant richness of verbal inflection. According to this
view, V-to-I movement is observed in exactly the languages with rich verbal inflection. This
hypothesis has been expressed in several ways in the literature, depending on whether or not
one adopts a minimalist perspective, and is repeated here in (6)-(7), see e.g. Pollock (1989),
Ouhalla (1988), Platzack (1988), Platzack & Holmberg (1989), Chomsky (1993).
(6)
Overt V-movement is triggered by rich verbal morphology
1
Vikner (1995a: 149) cites the following Faroese example from Barnes (1987):
(i) ??at studentarnir skuldu skrivliga svara spurninginum
that students-the should in writing answer question-the
According to his informants (i) might be acceptable in a rather formal style. See below for a discussion.
2
(7)
Infl has a strong V-feature iff Infl has rich morphology
More generally, on the basis of contrasts such as the ones illustrated above, (8) has been
proposed to be a principle of Universal Grammar.
(8)
Syntactic Movement is triggered by morphology (Haegeman 1997)
In this paper we argue that (8) cannot be a UG principle. To the extent that it holds at all, we
show that the correlation between overt movement and the presence of rich morphology is a
consequence of the mechanisms by which rich morphology comes into being in the
diachronic development of languages, and of the restricted nature of the mechanisms by
which syntactic processes such as verb movement can be lost. We present potential triggers
for the loss of V-to-I movement that make no direct reference to (the loss of) morphology.
The paper is broken down as follows: First, we consider the issue of whether the correlation
between morphology and overt movement proposed for V-to-I movement extends to other
domains of grammar, and we will arrive at a negative result (Section 2). We then show that
the problem of exactly characterizing "rich" morphology has not been solved satisfactorily.
What can at most be defended is that all SVO languages with "rich" suffixal inflection have
overt verb movement - no other correlations hold (Sections 3 and 4). We then present the
diachronic explanation for the connection between overt verb movement and presence of rich
inflection. This is complemented by a demonstration that the loss of overt verb movement is
only indirectly influenced by a loss of inflection (Section 5).
2.
2.1.
Morphology and movement from a broader perspective
Problem A: Is (8) a correlation only for V-to-I movement?
In this section we show that the type of correlation proposed for V-to-I-movement between
rich morphology and overt movement is not observed in any other domain of grammar. Thus,
V-to-I movement would be the only process for which such a link between overt displacement
and rich morphology holds. But even if restricted to that domain, the correlation does not hold
universally: there are languages (e.g. Irish) that show V-movement to I (see McCloskey 1996)
in the complete absence of morphology.
Consider first the phenomenon of verb second movement (V2), the movement of the finite
verb (Infl) to the second position of the clause, a process that can, e.g., be observed in main
clause questions in all Germanic languages, and also in the other main clauses in all Germanic
languages except English (9). It is standardly assumed that the finite verb occurs in the
position Comp in V2 constructions (Thiersch 1978; see Vikner 1995a for a recent discussion
and references).
(9)
a.
b.
c.
*Maybe has Peter read this book
Måske har Peter læst denne go
Vielleicht hat Peter dieses Buch gelesen.
Note that German has a rich system of agreement, whereas there is no agreement at all in
Danish. Nevertheless, the finite verb moves to Comp both in Danish (9b) and in German (9c).
In other words, the presence or absence of V2 does not predict whether inflectional
morphology is rich. Likewise, neither rich (German vs. Italian) nor weak (Danish vs. English)
morphology imply that verb second movement applies in all main clauses. The V2 property is
3
unconnected to any morphological property.
Turning to a further instance of head movement, consider N-movement within the DP. Since
the establishment of the 'DP hypothesis' (see e.g. Abney 1987, Horrocks & Stavrou 1987,
Szabolcsi 1987), research on the noun phrase opened up questions similar to those asked
about the number, the types, and the role of functional projections in CP/IP in the light of
Ouhalla's (1988) and Pollock's (1989) 'split INFL' hypothesis. In particular, there has been
extensive discussion of N-movement to D or an intermediate functional category (if there is
one). It has been argued that N-movement is parametrized across languages much like Vmovement is. The conceptual motivation for it lies in the general spirit of the parallelism
between the nominal and the clausal domain: N-movement parallels V-movement. A powerful hypothesis arguing for the existence of N-movement is based on the placement of the noun
with respect to a number of adjectives modifying it. This is tied with specific assumptions
about the status of adjectives. These are: a) adjectives are XPs, and b) adjectives appear in
strict order DP-internally, which follows from an analysis in which these are placed in the
unique specifiers of the various functional projections established independently within DP
(see Cinque 1993).
On the basis of this hypothesis we again observe that languages fall into two groups if one
considers the relative order of the noun and an adjective modifying it (10a vs. 10b). Assuming
that adjectives are situated at the same position across languages (Cinque 1993), the order in
(10b) has been attributed to the application of head movement of the noun to a functional
head inside the DP (10c) (Bernstein 1993, Cinque 1993, among others). Thus, the contrasts in
(11) and (12) suggest that Spanish has N-movement, while Greek lacks it:
(10)
a.
b.
c.
Art Adj N
Art N Adj
[DP D [FP N [ADj t
(11)
a.
(12)
b.
a.
La muchacha americana
the girl American
* la americana muchacha
i amerikanida gineka
the American woman
* i gineka amerikanida
b.
Spanish
Greek
However, this state of affairs does not correlate with the richness of noun morphology in the
two languages. Greek nouns bear ‘rich’ inflection, as they inflect for number, gender and case
(13), while their Romance counterparts inflect only for number and gender ((14) according to
Bernstein, o and a function like gender markers; cf. Harris 1991):
(13)
a.
b.
(14)
a.
b.
i
the-fem:sg:nom
ton
the-fem:pl:gen
amerikanid-a
American- fem:sg:nom
amerikanid-on
American-fem:pl:gen
muchach-o
boy
muchach-agirl
muchach-o-s
boys
muchach-a-s
girls
4
ginek-a
woman- fem:sg:nom
ginek-on
woman-fem:pl:gen
Thus, while Spanish nouns are well behaved for (8), this does not hold for Greek nouns. Of
the three well-studied cases of head movement, only one, viz. V-to-I-movement, does not
falsify (8) in a straightforward way.
NP-Movement does not seem to fall under (8) either. Movement to Spec,IP is independent of
morphology. (15)-(16) illustrate Raising in English and Icelandic. In both languages the
subject DP moves from the lower clause to Spec,IP of the matrix clause (15) - (16) for reasons
of the EPP and/or Case checking. However, nouns inflect for Case and number in Icelandic
only, while English nouns lack all signs of inflection. Likewise, the attracting head Infl has
rich morphology in Icelandic only, but not in English.
(15)
Steve seems to love Madrid
(16)
Ólafuri
virtist
[ti
Olaf-nom seemed
lesa margar bækur]
read many books
Icelandic
(Sigurðsson 1989)
Furthermore, Irish VSO and Chinese SVO clauses (see Aoun & Li 1993, among others)
exemplify the absence of NP-movement in the absence of inflection, while Greek VSO orders
present a case where no NP-movement to Spec,IP takes place in the presence of morphology:
although Greek nouns and verbs bear inflection (see above), movement to the subject position
is not necessary. Evidence for this comes from a combination of adverbial and participial
placement facts in periphrastic constructions (cf. Alexiadou 1997). As shown in (17), the
order of constituents in these environments in Greek is: auxiliary, aspectual adverb,
participle, light manner adverb and subject. In Alexiadou (1997), the relative order between
the light manner adverb, which marks the left edge of the VP, and the participle is taken as
evidence showing that the participle has moved outside the VP domain. There it is argued that
the participle reaches Asp.2 The subject in (17) follows both the light manner adverb and the
participle. From this we can conclude that the subject stays in its VP internal position (see
Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1998 for further discussion).
(17) an ehi idhi
diavasij [VP kala[VP o Petros tj
to
if has already read
well
Peter-nom the
"If Peter has already read the lesson well".
mathima]].
lesson
A'-movement certainly does not lend support to (8) either. If there is a tendency for whmovement, it certainly goes in the opposite direction of (8): the overt manifestation of a [+wh]
feature of Comp (as we find it in Japanese) normally implies a wh-in-situ strategy (see e.g.
Cheng 1991), but the reverse does not hold (no overt wh-movement in the absence of "scope
marking" in Chinese or Hindi). There are no overt features of the wh-phrase which one could
correlate with the absence or presence of movement. Focus movement suggests a similar
pattern. As (18) shows, DPs can be fronted across languages to a Focus/Topic position in the
absence of any relevant morphology:
(18)
2
a.
Den Ball hat David Beckam nicht getroffen
the ball has D.B.
not kicked
German
In Cinque (1999), it is argued that participles raise in all Romance languages as well.
5
b.
AZ ÙJSÁGOT dobtam el
the newspaper-acc threw-I away
'It is the newspaper that I threw away'
Hungarian
On the other hand, (19) illustrates that a language that marks focus morphologically may lack
focus movement.
(19)
Raaman
Rama
ippoozee
now-Foc
varunnulluu
come-pres
Malayalam
If scrambling is the result of an overt movement process at all (see Boškovič & Kitahara
1998, Fanselow, to appear, for opposing views), it is certainly not linked to a morphological
property of the attracting head. Scrambled DPs often show "rich" Case morphology, but there
are languages with a rich Case system without scrambling (Icelandic), and languages with
scrambling but lacking rich Case distinctions (Bulgarian).
On the basis of the above, one has to conclude that V-to-I movement seems to be the only
movement operation taking place due to richness of inflection. Note that such a correlation
would more or less be unexpected in a minimalist concept of syntax: movement is triggered
by the need to check strong attracting (categorial) features of functional categories, and there
is no a priori reason for there being an implication between the strength of an attracting
feature and the morphology of the attractor or the attractee. From a minimalist perspective,
the two domains should rather be independent of each other. The absence of a clear
correlation such (8) is thus expected from a theoretical point of view - but this already renders
it quite unlikely that (8) should suddenly become valid when confined to V-to-I movement.
2.2.
Problem B: How to characterize rich inflection?
Even if there is no general correlation between movement and morphology, a generalization
such as (6) (= (8) restricted to V-to-I movement) connecting positional options of the verb
and its inflection calls for an explanation if it can be defended. In fact the evidence presented
in Haegeman (1997) seems to clearly suggest that whenever the verbal inflection in a
language is poor or even absent, then no verb movement takes place in this language.
Two issues arise here, however. First, even if one confines one's attention to the Germanic
languages and their various dialects, it turns out that defining rich/strong morphology is not
straightforward. In principle one would want to identify a necessary and sufficient condition
for V-to-I movement. In the literature there have been several such attempts (see Platzack
1988, Platzack & Holmberg 1989, Roberts 1993, Falk 1993, Vikner 1995, Rohrbacher 1999,
Koeneman 2000). It has been suggested that the presence of V-movement is linked to the
presence of person distinctions in a verbal paradigm (Platzack & Holmberg 1989), while for
other researchers number marking seems to play a crucial role (Roberts 1993). Rohrbacher
(1994) proposes that a language has V-to-I iff first and second person are differentiated in the
verbal paradigm. Whether such proposals are empirically adequate need not concern us for
the moment - what is important is that these approaches have in common that they take
number/person distinctions in a verbal paradigm to be the trigger for V-movement to Infl -V
movement is not linked to a property of the individual morphemes (see Bobaljik 2000 for a
discussion and criticism of such approaches).
More generally, the question to what extent syntactic variation is or should be expressed as
6
language specific knowledge about morphology, even where this knowledge is not encoded
with individual lexical entries, is not really dealt with satisfactorily (see Snyder 1995,
Rohrbacher 1999). As Snyder points out, it is not clear whether there is a principled reason to
expect the particular feature combinations distinguished by a given morphological paradigm
to have direct consequences for language specific properties of syntax. One could imagine
that the implications are completely reverse.
Furthermore, as has been pointed out by Vikner (1995a), all these approaches face a problem
on the ground that there are languages like Late Old Swedish (Falk 1993:172f.) or Faroese
(Vikner 1995a) in which V-to-I is optional. For instance, Late Old Swedish, and the
Norwegian dialect of Hallingdalen make number distinctions, but may lack V-movement as
illustrated in the following examples.
(20)
Late Old Swedish (15th century):
s
kräver 'demand'
p
kräva
(21)
at cristet folk mz truldoms listom forvinna alla pinor
that christian people with witchcraft overcome all pains
(22)
Hallingdalen
s
kasta 'throw'
p
kastæ
(23)
at me ikkje kjøpæ bokje
that we not buy book-the
(Falk 1993: 173)
Moreover, approaches based on paradigms cannot explain the difference between main verbs
and auxiliaries in English. As is well known, auxiliaries move to Infl in English, while main
verbs do not do so.
(24)
a.
b.
*John kisses often Mary
John has often kissed Mary
3.
V-to-I in correlation with the inventory of functional projections
Bobaljik & Jonas (1996) explored the possibility that the main trigger for V-movement should
not be formulated in terms of counting fine distinctions in the paradigms involved, but rather
by concentrating on the inventory of functional elements or projections that a language might
make use of. Bobaljik (1995), Thraínsson (1995), Bobaljik & Thraínsson (1998) propose that
languages may vary as to whether they have a pre-pollockian unsplit IP or an IP containing an
Agreement phrases distinct from Tense (25) (the so called Split Infl Parameter).
7
(25)
a.
IP
b.
AgrP
I'
I
Agr'
VP
Agr
TP
T'
T
AgrP
Agr'
Agr
VP
In particular, Bobaljik & Thrainsson (1998) argue that there are a series of straightforward
consequences of assuming such a parameter, both for the syntax and for the morphology,
namely there are more specifier positions in (25b) than in (25a), there are non local relations
among Infl-type heads in (25b), and there are more terminal nodes in (25b) than in (25a). On
this view, on might expect two VP external subject positions (the specifiers of AgrP and TP)
and perhaps a VP external DP object position in languages that have structure (25b), but not
in those that have (25a). The authors claim that this is the correct interpretation of multiple
subject position and object shift phenomena in Icelandic - as opposed to Mainland
Scandinavian and English. Hence Icelandic licenses Spec,TP as an intermediate subject
position, allows for object shift, and exhibits transitive expletive constructions. On the other
hand, languages such as English, lack object shift, transitive expletive constructions and do
not license Spec,TP as a further subject position.
(26)
(27)
a.
það klaruðu margar mys [VP alveg ostinn]
there finished many mice completely the cheese
TEC
b.
það klaruðu margar mys ostinn [VP alveg ]
there finished many mice the cheese completely
'Many mice completely finished the cheese '
OS
*there read a man a book
Furthermore, the authors develop an account of verb movement, according to which feature
checking can take place both with movement and without movement (between a head and its
complement). In (25a) feature checking is thus allowed without movement, since Infl and V
stand in a head complement relationship. Economy conditions will then imply that feature
checking must not take place via movement. Therefore, there is no V-to-Infl movement in
languages with an unsplit Infl. In (25b), however, only the lowest functional head is in a
complement relation with the verb, hence verb movement seems required for feature checking
with higher heads. Per se, this forces overt or covert movement of the verb, so no predictions
concerning a visible displacement of V are made as such. However, Bobaljik and Thrainsson
assume that verb movement to Infl is always overt.
In recognizing that it is the terminal nodes of syntax that correspond to abstract morphemes
which may be the locus of lexical insertion, the Split Infl Parameter predicts that languages
with only one inflectional head will be limited to one inflectional affix after the verb stem,
8
while languages with a split Infl may (but need not) allow more. In a language like Icelandic,
the verb shows clear marking for both tense and agreement identified by the presence of two
separate morphemes for these categories (28). This is not however the case in English, where
tense and agreement morphemes are in complementary distribution:
(28)
kasta 'throw'
1sg
2sg
3sg
Icelandic
PresentPast
kasta
kasta-r
kasta-r
kasta-ði
kasta-ði-r
kasta-ði
1pl
2pl
3pl
köst-um
kast-ið
kasta
köstu-ðu-m
köstu-ðu-ð
köstu-ðu
English tremble
PresentPast
tremble
trembl-ed
tremble
trembl-ed
tremble-s
trembl-ed
*tremble-d-s
tremble
trembl-ed
tremble
trembl-ed
tremble
trembl-ed
Note, however, that it is only Icelandic that shows the full set of properties linked to a split
Infl (transitive expletives, object shift, and verb movement); the relevant dialect of Faroese
lacks object shift.
Moreover, French, Italian (and Catalan) are languages which have distinct Agr and Tense
morphology (Belletti 1990: 28):
(29)
je romp-er-ai
I break-fut-1sg
The above reasoning correctly predicts that V-movement takes place in these languages.
However, as is well known these languages lack the properties associated with Icelandic, i.e.
transitive expletives and object shift (30). Thus the correlation here is weakened.
(30)
*il achetait
un enfant un livre
there has bought a child a book
If only languages with a split Infl allow more than one inflectional morpheme attached to V,
then the prediction is made that V-movement should take place in such language. The
distinction should not in principle be taken to make reference only to Tense and agreement
morphemes, but also to other inflectional categories. For instance, in Greek there is no distinct
agreement and tense morphology, but V-movement takes place (Rivero 1994; (32)). Note,
however, that the language marks Aspect morphologically. In (31), e is a phonetic vowel, and
-s is the perfective Aspect marker. On the other hand, we do not find any evidence for object
shift of the type found in Icelandic (see Alexiadou 1999), and there is no transitive expletive
constructions in Greek.
(31)
Present
Past Imperfective
Past Perfective
rihn-o
rihn-is
rihn-i
rihn-ume
rihn-ete
rihn-un
e-rihn-a
e-rihn-es
e-rihn-e
rihn-ame
rihn-ate
rihn-ane
e-rik-s-a
e-rik-s-es
e-risk-s-e
rik-s-ame
rik-s-ate
rik-s-ane
9
'throw
(32)
riksame
amesos
ti bala
threw-perf:1pl immediately the ball-acc
'We threw the ball immediately'
The empirical force of the Split-Infl-approach is thus weakened, since its predictive success is
confined to V-movement, see also Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou (1997b); note though
Bobaljik (2000) is certainly correct in pointing out that, of the properties considered, only Vmovement is forced by a split Infl. It should be added, however, that the evidence for V-to-I
movement in subordinate clauses is not uncontroversial for German or Dutch (see Haider
1993 and Koopman 1995 for counterarguments). It may thus very well be the case that there
ARE languages with distinct Tense and Agreement morphology, transitive expletive
constructions, and object shift that disallow verb movement. Moreover, according to Vikner
(1995a), the proposal that distinct Tense/Agreement morphology implies overt verb movement is incompatible with Faroese. In Faroese past tense, the verb clearly inflects for tense
and agreement (33), but no V-movement takes place in one of the two dialects of the
language, in the other dialect, verb movement is only optional:3
(33)
kasta-ð-i
kasta-ði
kasta-ði
kasta-ð-u
kasta-ðu
kasta-ðu
kasta 'throw', Bobaljik (2000)
It is also far from being clear that the Split-Infl idea can be successfully extended to other
instances of head movement. Thus, Infl moves to Comp in (34) in spite of the fact that Infl is
the head of the complement of Comp, so that the features of Comp selecting Infl would have
to be checked without movement in an approach that extends feature checking to the headcomplement relation. The strict correlation between the distance of two heads H and K and
the application of overt head movement would therefore have to be confined to the interaction
of V and Infl4.
(34)
what [Comp will] she [Infl _ ] say?
For obvious reasons, the Split Infl idea finally fails to be compatible with the assumption that
negative expressions and adverbs that appear higher than VP but lower that IP are heads or
specifiers of headed projections (see e.g. Alexiadou 1994, 1997, Cinque 1999). In (35), VP is
3
Bobaljik & Thrainsson actually claim that, although there is a vowel alternation in the past tense, this
alternation is an instance of vowel change, and not a sequence of two affixes. Hence the language allows an
analysis with unsplit Infl, and can therefore lack V-movement. If we disregard the optionality problem discussed
above, this approach is certainly able to explain away this problem. Note here that Jonas (2000) makes a
distinction between two dialects of Faroese. Both have V-movement, but they differ with respect to the height of
negation attachment. In the dialect where negation is low V-to-I movement takes place, in fact the dialect that
has less morphology seems to have more movement.
4
One might try to counter this line of reasoning by placing an additional functional head between Comp and Infl
in (34), but -in addition to the issue of its independent motivation- one question is why the presence of this head
does not force Infl-to-Comp movement in subordinate clauses as well.
10
not the complement of Infl, so that the establishment of a checking relation between Infl and
V seems to presuppose movement even if one grants that heads may check features of their
complements.
(35)
[IP ... Infl ... [XP NEG/Adv [VP V ...
To the extent that negation and adverbs are inherently related to head position in the sense just
specified, the Split-Infl idea faces a serious problem.
4.
A defensible implicational generalization
Some of the evidence presented above already suggests that the connection between "rich
morphology" and overt movement is not a bi-conditional one. In fact, Vikner (1994)5 has
come to the conclusion that only an implicational relation - the one indicated in (36)- is defensible.
(36)
The verb may only stay in V if there is no inflectional morphology.
Such a formulation linking rich inflection to V movement but not vice versa comes very close
to what one finds empirically (see below). Within the Germanic language, richly inflected
Icelandic shows V-to-I-movement - while the generalization cannot be strengthened to a biconditional because of the notorious Kronoby dialect of Swedish, which displays V-to-Imovement in the absence of verbal agreement inflection.
(37)
he va bra et an tsöfft int bootsen
it was good that he bought not book-the
Second, V-to-I-movement takes place in Irish, although verbs do not bear inflectional
morphemes (see McCloskey 1996):
(38)
a.
b.
Chuala Róise go minic roimhe an t-amhr·n sin
heard Róise often before-it that song
'Róise had often heard that song before'
Gheall sé go bhfillfeadh sé ar an bhaile
promised he that return he on home
'He promised that he would return home'
(McCloskey 1996:269)
Likewise, there are some SVO creole languages (see Battista 1999) that show verb movement
in the absence of agreement or any inflectional morphology. Therefore, in line with Vikner's
(1994) cautious formulation, one must conclude that languages without rich verbal
morphology may or may not show verb movement to Infl. The absence of rich inflection does
not predict anything with respect to verb movement. Likewise, infinitival verbs can move to
Infl, too, although they lack inflection. As shown in (39), infinitivals do move in Italian, but
not in French, although in both languages they lack inflectional features:
5
In later work, Vikner (1995b) proposes the following generalization:
(i)
V-to I iff person morphology is found in all tenses.
This faces a problem with the data to be discussed below.
11
(39)
a.
b.
c.
d.
*ne lire pas le livre
neg read not the book
ne pas lire le livre
non leggere più il libro
*non piu leggere il libro
Vikner's generalization still implies, however, that richly inflected verbs must not stay in situ.
For the Germanic and Romance SVO languages, this implication indeed seems to hold (at
least, there is no known counterexample), but -as we have already pointed out- it is not at all
obvious that richly inflecting SOV language like German fall in line with (36).
Presumably, there are also SVO-languages that do not support (36). Noonan (1992:122)
describes the situation in Lango, where V-to-I movement appears to fail to take place in the
presence of rich agreement which is pre-fixal (cf. Noonan 1992:122): adverbial adjuncts are
placed either at the beginning or end of a sentence (cf. (40)), and "the negative particles [,,,]
are normally placed between the subject and the verb".
(40)
lóce
man
ògeò
3s-kick-perf
gwôk àwó'ró
dog yesterday
Therefore, (41) seems to be the only generalization that can be defended.
(41)
Suffixal rich inflection implies V-to-I-movement.
5.
A Historical Perspective
One now has to identify the factor that is responsible for the validity of (41). In the light of the
present discussion it should be obvious that (41) is an unlikely candidate for an independent
principle of Universal Grammar. Note that it certainly need not be the case that all properties
characterizing natural languages in general must be due to such independent principles of UG.
What is a possible grammar is also influenced by factors such as processability or learnability:
natural languages must be produced and understood by their speakers, and they must be
acquired by children. Furthermore, natural language grammars are not invented and designed
by language engineers, and put to use only later - rather, they are the products of diachronic
processes, the results of a series of steps of language change. It is at least conceivable that the
mechanisms of language change are such that certain combinations of properties simply
cannot arise as the product of a natural diachronic process. Such a scenario is rather likely if as seems to be generally accepted nowadays - syntactic change is the result of shifts in the
analysis of constructions of the adult language by language acquiring children, in such a way
that the surface outputs of the two grammars should differ minimally only at first. This
restricts the nature of a possible syntactic changes considerably, so that certain grammatical
systems, although compatible with UG, can never be observed among the world's languages,
because they cannot arise naturally. It is our claim that the V-to-I-movement generalization
exemplifies a case of such arrays of properties that cannot arise in natural language change
processes.
Our argument involves three steps. First, it needs to be established how strong systems of
suffixal agreement morphology come into being; second, the emergence of SVO order must
be investigated. Finally, reasons for the loss of V-to-I movement must be identified, with a
discussion of possible relations to the impoverishment of verbal inflection.
12
5.1. The direct Path to an SVO System with rich Inflection
It seems to have been established that suffixal inflectional systems arise via the cliticization of
a subject pronoun clitic (see Givón 1976, Corbett 1995). The sequence V + clitic is reinterpreted as V+AGR. For there to be a chance for the suffixal re-interpretation of such a clitic,
the verb must appear in front of the subject pronoun, either in Infl or in C.
(42)
a.
b.
[Infl verb] [vP subject .... ]
[Comp verb] [IP subject .... ]
Thus, strong suffixal inflection can arise only if there is verb movement. If V does not move
to I or C, the subject pronoun simply is not on the correct side of the verb to be reanalyzed as
a suffixal inflection by language-acquiring children. At the point of the emergence of rich
inflection, at least, it is clear why a correlation such as (41) holds – not because of a principle
of UG, but because rich suffixal agreement could not arise in a language without verb
movement. No similar necessity for the verb being placed outside VP exists for a process of
building up prefixal agreement, however. Therefore, languages like Lango which rich inflection but lacking verb movement pose no problem at all.
Do we have synchronic evidence for the view that rich inflection arises from a reinterpretation
of subject clitics? We will present data from two languages that exemplify the transition from
a clitic pronoun to a verbal inflection.
The first case to be considered here is Irish. The language exhibits complementarity of what
might appear to be person-number agreement on the verb, and the appearance of a phonologically expressed subject (pronominal or DP).
(43)
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
D'eirigh Ciaran
rose-3sg Ciaran
D'eirigh na girseachai
rose-3sg the girls
D' eirigh me
rose-3sg I
d'eiriodar
rose-3pl
*chuirfine mé
put(cond). 1sg I
Irish
McCloskey & Hale (1984) show that (43d) is the result of the incorporation of a subject pronoun into the adjacent verb - it does not involve agreement morphology in a strict sense. The
status of the verbal ending as an incorporated subject is still visible, as it is, e.g., possible to
conjoin the inflectional subject with a lexically specified NP (McCloskey & Hale 1984):
(44)
dá mbeinn-se agus tusa ann
if be(condit S1) contr and you there
'if you and I were there'
The complementarity of the clitic subject pronoun and full lexical NPs, combined with further
evidence like the one just presented, makes the non-agreement status of the phonological
material attached to the verb still quite evident for the language-acquiring child.
13
A somewhat different case in point (but a "more advanced one" with respect to building up
agreement morphology, if you wish to say so) comes from various varieties of Arabic, where
left dislocated subjects involving clitic doubling develop into A-subjects (data from Aoun,
Benmamoun & Sportiche 1994).
In Standard Arabic verbs give the impression of exhibiting full (person, number & gender)
agreement with the subject in SVO orders at first glance, but they show partial/deficient
'agreement' (i.e. agreement only in gender & number) in VSO orders (45):
(45)
a.
b.
Naama l-?awlaad-u
slept-3S the children-nom
'The children slept'
?al-?awlad-u naamuu
the children-nom slept-pl
Ouhalla (1994) proposes that (45b) involves a left dislocated subject with clitic doubling
involving a resumptive pronoun rather than simply agreement. For example, the fact that one
cannot find indefinite NPs in preverbal position (see (46)) strongly supports this view.
(46)
a.
b.
*?ahad-un raqas-a maca-ha
one-nom danced-3sg with her
'Someone danced with her'
raqas-a ?ahad-un maca-ha
danced someone-nom with her
The canonical Standard Arabic clause pattern and the agreement system in a strict sense is
thus exemplified in (45a) only. Notice, however, that cliticized subject pronouns and full
lexical NPs are not complementarily distributed in Standard Arabic, so that there is a certain
likelihood that the input pattern (47a) will be reinterpreted as an agreement pattern (47b) by
language-acquiring children.
(47)
a.
b.
[FP S [IP V+clitic
[IP S V+Agr
This indeed seems to have happened in Moroccan Arabic, where both SVO and VSO orders
show full agreement between the verb and the subject.
(48)
a.
b.
c.
*N?as le-wlaad
slept.3s the children
na?su le-wlaad
slept.3pl the children
le-wlaad na?su
the children slept.3pl
Moroccan Arabic
Moroccan Arabic also lost the difference in distribution of definite and indefinite NPs in
preverbal position - which shows no restrictions concerning specificity or definiteness. In
other words, the preverbal position has acquired the status of a standard subject position. The
former clitic pronoun has been reinterpreted as an agreement morpheme.
14
(49)
hetta wahed maza
even one neg-came 3MS
Anyone didn't come
We may thus take Irish, Standard Arabic, and Moroccan Arabic to represent three stages in
the transition from a grammar with subject clitics to a grammar with agreement. First, the
clitic status of the morpheme M is still obvious because of the complementarity of M with a
full lexical subject NP. "Later", clitic doubling is introduced, which blurs the evidence simple distributional facts no long rule out an agreement interpretation, but -as in Standard
Arabic- there may be other evidence E like restrictions for indefinites that make the clitic
status of M still learnable. When E is lost, there is no reason for the children to not go for the
(simpler) analysis in which M is an agreement morpheme.
5.2.
The path via V2 systems
We have just seen how suffixal agreement morphology arises, and why this process is intimately linked to the presence of verb movement to a pre-subject position. In its initial stage, the
suffixal agreement system can only occur in a language in which the verb moves in front of
the subject. For SVO systems that emerge because of a reinterpretation of left dislocated
subjects of VSO clauses, the link between rich morphology and V-to-I movement thus seems
established.
However, the verb can also be placed into a pre-subject position by moving to Comp (the
verb-second option), and while V-to-C movement seems to always proceed via Infl, we need
to show why the diachronic shift from a V2-grammar to an SVO-grammar always leads to
languages with V-to-I movement. Note that the transition from V2 to SVO may take place at a
time when verbal inflection is rich. If we want to capture the implication of verb movement
by rich verbal morphology, we must show that no language without V-to-I movement but
with rich inflection can arise in this context. This point is particularly relevant for us, since
Germanic and Romance languages (which constitute the major bulk of evidence for the
correlation under discussion) originated from an Indoeuropean (IE) origin, which probably
was a richly inflected verb-second language (with a verb-final base order), as Krisch (2000)
deduces from the fact that Sanskrit, Latin, Hittite, and other early IE languages show some V2
effects (apparently more reminiscent of what one presently finds in Kashmiri (see Bhatt 1999)
rather than German). Romance and some Germanic languages then made the transition from
V2 to SVO.
The transition from V2 systems to SVO-languages primarily seems to involve the reanalysis
of a string involving a clause-initial subject followed by a verb. During the V2 stage, (50a) is
the correct analysis of such a string; when the language shifts over to the SVO type, (50b)
becomes relevant.
(50)
a.
b.
[CP subject [Comp verb] .... {adverb, negation} ... ]
[IP subject [Infl verb] .... {adverb, negation} ... ]
Note that the reinterpretation of (50a) as (50b) leaves the position of adverbs/negation relative
to the finite verb constant: when a phonetic sequence subject-verb-X-adverb-Y is no longer
interpreted as a CP by children, the string verb ... adverb/negation constitutes perfect
evidence for an SVO language with V-to-I movement (and against a grammar without V-to-I
movement). There are many reasons for why such a reanalysis may take place (see e.g. Kroch,
15
to appear) - an increase of the number of left-dislocation structures at the cost of the simple
topicalization of objects may, e.g., blur the evidence for the V2 analysis of a subject-verb
string to such an extent that language acquiring children start preferring (50b) (this may have
happened during the history of French).
Whatever the precise individual reason may be in each case that such a transition is made, the
simple reanalysis in (50) implies the greatest possible extent of harmony in terms of the
surface strings between the old grammar and the new one (the new one produces a subset of
the strings allowed by the old one, and nothing more). Therefore, there can be no strong
positive evidence in the linguistic input that might encourage those children who made the
transition to (50b) to revise their grammars later on the basis of some adult sentence. The
development in (50) is thus not an unlikely one.
In contrast, a transition from a V2 grammar to an SVO language without movement to Infl
would imply that the surface strings cannot remain constant. The output (51) of the new
grammar would not be acceptable to the adults' grammar, and the adults' output subject-verbadverb ... would be ruled ungrammatical by the grammar of the children. It is highly unlikely
that a child hearing verb-adverb order only in his/her input would stick to a grammar
licensing (51) in the light of the evidence he/she is constantly confronted with.
(51)
[IP subject adverb [Infl verb] ....... ]
In other words, a natural process of language change in the process of language acquisition by
children can transform a V2 system into an SVO-language with V-to-Infl movement only. No
richly inflected verb can escape from movement to Infl, in this kind of language change at
least.
5.3.
The Loss of V-to-I and the Loss of Inflection
The correlation presently under consideration that rich inflection implies V-to-I movement
has been derived for the initial stages of SVO systems that arise from VSO or V/2 grammars
in a diachronic process6. A simple reflection reveals that a later loss of V-to-Infl movement is
not a very likely incident. Verb movement is not lost "spontaneously", i.e., a child confronted
with verb adverb-order will not postulate a grammar lacking verb movement without reasons.
A loss of verb movement will occur only if the grammar allows an additional movement
process that changes the order of the two elements frequently enough, so that the evidence for
V-to-I movement becomes less and less transparent. If standard movement is leftward
bounded, the pertinent movement operation can be adverb preposing (targeting a position
immediately in front of the verb) only.
Stylistic Fronting (SF) is such an operation that is grammatical in Icelandic, and was so in
Mainland Scandinavian, too, by which adverbs may end up in front of the verb. As pointed
6
It is also conceivable that an S-Adv-O-V language develops into an S-Adv-V-O system by the frequent extraposition of all objects and PP adjuncts, so that the input could be reinterpreted as an SVO system without V-to-I
movement by children. In principle, the transition could be made at any stage of the inflectional paradigm, so
that a grammar violating the correlation we discuss might arise in this way. The non-existence of such grammatical systems must thus be due to the fact that this kind of transition from SOV to SVO is excluded. A potential
reason could be that the headedness of VP is also (and perhaps primarily) encoded in the order of verbs and
auxiliaries - for which it is hard to see how it might be changed by extraposition.
16
out, e.g., by Holmberg (2000), SF targets the closest element to the right of the finite verb
(which could be a verbal particle, a negation, an adverb, or a PP), and places it into the first
position of the clause.
SF applies only when the subject position is unfilled. On the one hand, this is the case in
impersonal constructions (as in (52) from Old Swedish), but there are also constructions in
which the verb appears in third position (as in (53)). The latter type of data always involve
pronominal subjects - as Platzack (1988) argues, they are due to the fact that the weak
pronoun has cliticized to the Comp position, which leaves the subject slot empty, so that SF
can and must apply.
(52) att icke haffver feladh på manheet och modh iblandh vårt folk
that not has failed on manhood and courage among our people (Falk 1993:227)
(53) œn han eigh bannaþe ihesus namne
V3 with pronominal subject
if he not cursed Jesus' name
(Falk 1993: 188)
Data such as (53) are, we believe, the key to an understanding of the loss of V-to-I movement.
In the target grammar, the proper analysis of (53) has the finite verb bannaþe in Infl - but it is
preceded by negative operator eigh due to SF, which itself was triggered by the cliticization of
the subject pronoun onto Comp. But the string also allows another and indeed simpler
analysis: the pronoun is in the subject position, and the adverb precedes the verb because the
latter has not left VP. This is nothing but the loss of V-to-I movement. As Falk (1993:184)
observes, the latter process (which reinterprets the results of SF) coincides temporarily with
the loss of SF in Modern Swedish.
(54)
a.
b.
[CP [Comp œn han] [IP eigh [I’ bannaþe [VP
[CP œn [IP han [VP eigh bannaþe
Old
New
By the reinterpretation of structures with V in I preceded by material that has undergone SF,
as simple clauses with V in situ, verb movement can get lost in the history of a language - and
apparently has gone lost in exactly that way in Mainland Scandinavian. There are other
conceivable ways by which an adverb may get directly in front of Infl (e.g., adjunction to IP
in a structure with an inverted subject), but the reflection on SF already suggests that the loss
of V-to-I is linked to the fulfillment of a number of non-trivial presuppositions so that the
process is probably a rare one.
Having identified a likely reason for the loss of verb movement, we now have to deal with the
question of why this diachronic process apparently affects languages without a rich inflectional system only. We have no definitive answer to this question, but the following
reflection may be relevant.
Note that (53) suggests that the condition triggering SF is a prosodic one: exactly one prosodic word/phrase must precede the finite verb (see also Legendre, to appear). When the
subject is a clitic, this condition is not met, and SF applies. From a purely syntactic point of
view, however, Spec,IP might be left empty, as (52) suggests: Spec,IP is not filled by a DP
with a phonetic matrix. Furthermore, SF can meet the requirements of a prosodically defined
finite-second constraint only, it cannot normally satisfy the needs of a syntactic principle
(requiring there to be a DP in the specifier position of IP), since the category moved in front
of Infl is usually not a DP. If a DP is needed, an overt expletive would have to be inserted.
17
We therefore suspect that a language with SF respects a prosodically defined Infl-second
constraint, but it crucially allows the proper subject position to be phonetically unfilled, i.e.,
the language is of the pro-drop-type. But pro-drop languages normally have a rich inflectional
system. Thus, when inflection gets weak, the pro-drop property gets lost, too, so that SF is no
longer a proper way of dealing with unfilled Spec,IP positions in front of the verb. In such a
situation, SF ceases to be a grammatical process, so that adv verb order in the input can no
longer be attributed to SF by children - it then has to be the base generated order.
5.4.
Loose ends
The scenario described in the preceding paragraph is a possible explanation for the apparent
impossibility of V-movement getting lost when inflection is still strong. There may be other
possible causes, and there is no evidence to decide this issue at present. Likewise, V movement might get lost in different ways from the ones considered above, and for each of them, it
would have to be shown why it fails to be viable when inflection is strong.
Another topic that will have to be dealt with is the array of facts in English. In contrast to
main verbs, English auxiliaries can appear in Inf (55) - which suggest that the blocking of V
to I movement is more intimately connected to properties of lexical items than is predicted by
the present approaches of verb movement. Likewise, adverbs may intervene between the verb
and an object provided the latter is not a DP, as illustrated in (56).7
(55)
(56)
6.
John has not bought the book
John laughs often at Mary
Conclusion
In this paper, we have argued that there is no synchronic UG principle that establishes a link
between inflection and verb movement. To the extent that such a link can be defended
empirically (rich inflection is incompatible with there being no verb movement), we have
shown that it reduces to laws of the diachronic development of languages: systems of rich
inflection cannot arise without there being verb movement in the language, and, arguably,
verb movement cannot get lost as long as rich inflection exists. We have derived these laws
from simple assumptions concerning syntactic change. Our model argues for a new way of
accounting for certain syntactic laws, viz., by showing that grammars violating them cannot
arise in a natural process of language change.
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