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Abstract:This paper examines and evaluates what may be called the "Rich Agreement Hypothesis" (RAH) in the domain of verb movement asymmetries in Germanic. The most prominent current accounts (e.g., Rohrbacher's 1999 Morphology-Driven Syntax) require inspection of the internal make-up of paradigms and take overt morphological variation to be the cause of syntactic variation. A survey of the literature shows that these proposals are empirically untenable in their strong (bi-conditional) form; there are numerous cases of syntactic variation attested in the absence of corresponding morphological variation. The strongest sustainable descriptive generalization is a one-way implication from rich morphology to verb movement. Though this has been noted before, its implications have not been adequately discussed. While morphology-driven approaches could have explained a strong RAH; when faced with the weaker, one-way implication they can provide no account of why that correlation should hold, and are thus at best incomplete. That is, they provide no insight as to why there are no languages with rich morphology, but in which the finite verb remains in the VP. The particular correlations that are attested, and in particular the absence of a certain class of languages, do however follow from a theory which takes morphology to be not the cause, but rather a reflection, of syntactic structure, in line with common theorizing in morphology. The inflection-movement correlations that do exist therefore challenge rather than supporting morphology-driven approaches to morphosyntax. The standard analysis of this contrast, first proposed in its essentials by Travis (1984, pp. 144-145), is that in Icelandic (1a) the finite verb moves to Infl while in Danish (1b) the verb remains in situ in the VP. 2 Under this account, the Icelandic versus Danish contrast in (1) is assimilated to the parallel contrast between French and English (2a-b) analysed by Emonds (1978) and subsequently by Pollock (1989) and Chomsky (1991). John often kisses Mary. (Pollock 1989, p. 367) Another difference between Icelandic and Danish concerns the inventory of endings ('morphemes' in a loose sense) in the inflectional paradigms of finite verbs in these languages. In Icelandic, verbs display tense marking and agreement for person and number with the subject (3a). In Danish the only distinction marked is between preterite (i.e., past) and non-preterite tense (3b).1 Sources for paradigms where not explicitly noted are given in the appendix, along with a list of sources consulted in establishing the generalizations presented here. 2 Examples showing verb movement are given only in embedded clauses, to control for the verb second effect in root clauses, which obscures the patterns examined here. Readers familiar with the literature on verb movement in Germanic will recognize that the Icelandic example in (1a) is arguably insufficient to demonstrate that the verb is in Infl, given the prevalence of embedded verb second in this language (i.e., the verb could be in...
Abstract:This paper examines and evaluates what may be called the "Rich Agreement Hypothesis" (RAH) in the domain of verb movement asymmetries in Germanic. The most prominent current accounts (e.g., Rohrbacher's 1999 Morphology-Driven Syntax) require inspection of the internal make-up of paradigms and take overt morphological variation to be the cause of syntactic variation. A survey of the literature shows that these proposals are empirically untenable in their strong (bi-conditional) form; there are numerous cases of syntactic variation attested in the absence of corresponding morphological variation. The strongest sustainable descriptive generalization is a one-way implication from rich morphology to verb movement. Though this has been noted before, its implications have not been adequately discussed. While morphology-driven approaches could have explained a strong RAH; when faced with the weaker, one-way implication they can provide no account of why that correlation should hold, and are thus at best incomplete. That is, they provide no insight as to why there are no languages with rich morphology, but in which the finite verb remains in the VP. The particular correlations that are attested, and in particular the absence of a certain class of languages, do however follow from a theory which takes morphology to be not the cause, but rather a reflection, of syntactic structure, in line with common theorizing in morphology. The inflection-movement correlations that do exist therefore challenge rather than supporting morphology-driven approaches to morphosyntax. The standard analysis of this contrast, first proposed in its essentials by Travis (1984, pp. 144-145), is that in Icelandic (1a) the finite verb moves to Infl while in Danish (1b) the verb remains in situ in the VP. 2 Under this account, the Icelandic versus Danish contrast in (1) is assimilated to the parallel contrast between French and English (2a-b) analysed by Emonds (1978) and subsequently by Pollock (1989) and Chomsky (1991). John often kisses Mary. (Pollock 1989, p. 367) Another difference between Icelandic and Danish concerns the inventory of endings ('morphemes' in a loose sense) in the inflectional paradigms of finite verbs in these languages. In Icelandic, verbs display tense marking and agreement for person and number with the subject (3a). In Danish the only distinction marked is between preterite (i.e., past) and non-preterite tense (3b).1 Sources for paradigms where not explicitly noted are given in the appendix, along with a list of sources consulted in establishing the generalizations presented here. 2 Examples showing verb movement are given only in embedded clauses, to control for the verb second effect in root clauses, which obscures the patterns examined here. Readers familiar with the literature on verb movement in Germanic will recognize that the Icelandic example in (1a) is arguably insufficient to demonstrate that the verb is in Infl, given the prevalence of embedded verb second in this language (i.e., the verb could be in...
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