Verb Clusters, Verb Raising, and Restructuring

Abstract

This overview chapter reviews the major generalizations, trends, and theoretical findings of the research on verb clusters. The first part of the overview provides a summary of the diverse empirical distribution of verb clusters across West Germanic, including the results of several recent extensive dialectal studies. The variation within certain dialect groups is hypothesized to be the result of extensive dialectal bilingualism, and a descriptive rule system is given that reflects certain dialectal subset relations. The second part of the overview surveys the merits and limits of a range of syntactic approaches to the verb cluster phenomenon and concludes with some speculations about one of the core open issues – the question of why verbs cluster and what the deep motivation for the verb‐clustering phenomenon is. Among others, the following empirical issues and theoretical questions are discussed in this overview: (i) whether there is a direct or indirect causal relation between word order and morphology (in particular, the Infinitivus Pro Participio ‘infinitive for participle’ and Participium Pro Infinitivo ‘participle for infinitive’ effects); (ii) whether in verb clusters with three verbal elements, the 2‐1‐3 order exists as a genuine verb cluster order; (iii) whether verb cluster orders are derived by syntactic movement or other linearization mechanisms; (iv) whether and how verb clusters contribute to debates about the existence of directionality in syntax, the nature and motivation of movement, or the featural make‐up of the verbal domain; and (v) whether syntax can involve optionality.

English is (still) a West Germanic language

“…4 This is hardly a 'small number' (E&F:66); see also Taylor & Pintzuk (2015) for robust evidence that underlying VO must have been relatively common in OE. Examples of VO are given in (1)- (3); note that these involve postverbal pronominal objects, and therefore cannot be treated as instances of focalization, nor of verb projection raising (Wurmbrand 2005). 3, moreover, is from an early (Alfredian) West Saxon text.…”

An agent-based model of a historical word order change

“…Many verbal cluster word orders are attested in different Germanic languages (Wurmbrand, 2006). We will illustrate this with a Dutch example, a language where the ordering of these verbs is relatively free.…”

A “borderline case” of syntactic variation

“…The variation attested in 3verb-clusters (either in German or Dutch dialects) is one of those topics where keywords like "surface variation", "optionality", and "under-determination" show up regularly. The reason is simple: nearly all possible linear orderings of the three verbs are attested in the various West Germanic dialects, see Schmid/Vogel (2004) and Wurmbrand (2006Wurmbrand ( , 2017 for a detailed and comprehensive overview about the data and theoretical approaches in recent years. Seiler (2004) detected an interesting areal pattern of variation in Swiss-ALM: he shows that the attested patterns can be modeled by assuming that head-finality increasingly vanishes from East to West.…”