CAS LX 522 Syntax I

CAS LX 522Syntax I Week 8b. Head-movement

The puzzle so far. • Head-order and specifier-order parameters can derive the some but not all types of language: • SVO(spec-initial, head-initial) (English) • SOV(spec-initial, head-final) (Japanese) • VOS(spec-final, head-initial) (Malagasy) • OVS(spec-final, head-final) (Hixkaryana) • VSO(?) (Irish, Arabic) • Relative verb-adverb position, French v. English: • French: Je mangesouvent des pommes. • English: I ofteneat apples. • Auxiliary inversion in English yes-no questions: • Bill should eat his peas. Should Bill eat his peas?

Movement • We start with the question of where should is in: • Should Bill eat his peas? • There is one position in our sentence structures so far that is to the left of the subject, the one where the complementizer that goes (C): • I said that Bill should eat his peas. • This is not where we expect should to be, though. It is, after all, a modal, of category I. It is not a complementizer. • Also notice that if we embed this question, should stays after the subject, and if is in C: • I wonder if Bill should eat his peas.

Movement • All of this suggests that the way to look at this is that we start with the sentence… • Bill should eat his peas • …as usual, and if we’re forming a yes-no question, we follow this up by movingshouldto the position of C. If we can’t move it (in an embedded question, there’s already something in C: if), it stays put.

French • Jean mange souvent des pommes.Jean eats often of.the apples‘Jean often eat apples.’ • If we suppose that the French sentence starts out just like the English sentence, we have the underlying representation shown here. • What needs to happen to get the correct surface word order? IP DP I Jean I VP [PRES] VP AP souvent PP V mange despommes

French Wait! But isn’t that inexcusably Anglo-centric? If you (or Chomsky) were a native speaker of French, would the French sentence structure be considered to be basic? • Jean mange souvent des pommes.Jean eats often of.the apples‘Jean often eat apples.’ • If we suppose that the French sentence starts out just like the English sentence, we have the underlying representation shown here. • What needs to happen to get the correct surface word order? IP DP I Jean I VP [PRES] VP AP souvent PP V mange despommes

French Wait! But isn’t that inexcusably Anglo-centric? If you (or Chomsky) were a native speaker of French, would the French sentence structure be considered to be basic? • Jean mange souvent des pommes.Jean eats often of.the apples‘Jean often eat apples.’ • If we suppose that the French sentence starts out just like the English sentence, we have the underlying representation shown here. • What needs to happen to get the correct surface word order? IP DP I Jean I VP [PRES] VP AP Well, not necessarily. The verb eat (mange) needs to assign a q-role to the object apples (des pommes). It is easier (the theory is more elegant) if the assignment of q-roles happens between sisters (as a result of Merge). That leads us to the same conclusion: the French word order is derived, the English word order is basic. souvent PP V mange despommes

French • Jean mange souvent des pommes.Jean eats often of.the apples‘Jean often eat apples.’ • Of course—the V (mange) moves up to the I position. • This always happens in French with a tensed/agreeing verb. This generally doesn’t happen in English. • Hence, the difference in “adverb position” (really, of course, it’s verb position) IP DP I Jean V+I VP mange+[PRES] VP AP souvent PP V mange despommes

What happens whenV moves to I? • To show that V attaches to I, but that I remains primary, this is drawn in the tree structure like this. • We say that V head-adjoins(adjoins, head-to-head) to I. • The head formed this way is sometimes called a complex head, (it’s an I with a V adjoined to it). IP DP I I VP I VP Vi AP mange [PRES] V PP ti

What happens whenV moves to I? • We should also consider what happens to the VP from which the V moved. • It is still a VP, it must still have a head. • We notate the original location of the V by writing t (standing for “trace” left behind by the original V), and we co-index the V and trace to indicate their relationship. IP DP I I VP I VP Vi AP mange [PRES] V PP ti

What happens whenV moves to I? • Since the VP is still a VP, it still gets a [V] category feature projected up from its head. • So the trace is still a verb. • In fact, there’s no reason to suppose that any of the features of the original verb have been removed given that [V] is still there. • We write it as t, but its content has not changed. The trace t is really just another copy (or, well, the original) of the verb. IP DP I I VP I VP Vi AP mange [PRES] V PP ti

What happens whenV moves to I? • What has changed is that the original verb is now related to a higher position in the tree, and for many purposes, the top copy in the tree is considered to be primary. • What we have created by moving the verb is a chain of positions in the tree that the verb has occupied. IP DP I I VP I VP Vi AP mange [PRES] V PP ti

What happens whenV moves to I? • When we think of moved elements in tree structures, we will often need to consider the chain of positions; this is usually written like:( Vi , ti ) • referring to the two positions held by Vi and ti in the structure here. IP DP I I VP I VP Vi AP mange [PRES] V PP ti

What happens whenV moves to I? • Using indices like that is kind of reminiscent of what we did when talking about Binding Theory—and it’s not a coincidence. • A fundamental property of movement is that the moved element must bind (c-command, and be coindexed with) the trace in the original position:Movement is only upwards. IP DP I I VP I VP Vi AP mange [PRES] V PP ti

What happens whenV moves to I? • Great. • So does Vi c-command ti? • X c-commands Yiff: • (i) X excludes Y, and • (ii) Any node thatdominates X alsodominates Y. IP DP I I VP I VP Vi AP mange [PRES] V PP ti

What happens whenV moves to I? Vi excludes I. I is not dominated by any segment of Vi. • Great. • So does Vi c-command ti? • X c-commands Yiff: • (i) X excludes Y, and • (ii) Any node thatdominates X alsodominates Y. IP DP I I VP I VP Vi AP mange [PRES] V PP ti

The only nodes that dominate Vi are I and IP. I does not dominate Vi because there is a segment of I that does not dominate Vi. Both IP and I dominate ti as well. So any node that dominates Vi also dominates ti. What happens whenV moves to I? • Great. • So does Vi c-command ti? • X c-commands Yiff: • (i) X excludes Y, and • (ii) Any node thatdominates X alsodominates Y. IP DP I I VP I VP Vi AP mange [PRES] V PP ti

Auxiliaries • English has two auxiliary (“helping”) verbs have and be, which cannot serve as the main verbs of a sentence but generally serve to indicate differences in verbal aspect (progressive, past perfect, …). • The auxiliary verbs often appear in I. Radford has had us up until now drawing them as if they exemplify the category I. • But really, these auxiliary verbs are verbs, they just have special properties. Among these properties: they can move to I.

Auxiliary verbs • The reason we can’t assume the auxiliaries have and be: • I am not singing. • I will not be singing. • I will not havebeen singing. • Rather, it looks like the topmost one moves to I, so long as nothing else is in I.

A word on auxiliaries • The underlying structure of a sentence with an auxiliary verb would be something like this, where the auxiliary verb heads a VP, and takes the main verb’s VP as its complement. IP DP I I VP -ed V VP have V … eaten

A word on auxiliaries • The underlying structure of a sentence with an auxiliary verb would be something like this, where the auxiliary verb heads a VP, and takes the main verb’s VP as its complement. IP DP I I VP I Vi V VP ti have [PAST] V … eaten

Why does V move to I? • If there is something in I already, like a modal, then even an auxiliary verb doesn’t move up to I. • John might not be eating apples. • If there is more than one auxiliary, only the topmost one seems to be move to I. • John has not been eating apples. • Only the auxiliaries that make it to I are inflected for tense (past, present). • This all suggests that the view this movement happens to solve some problem that I has. • If I needs something, auxiliaries can help by moving to I, but once the need is met, no other auxiliaries need to move. (We’ll come back to this)

English yes-no questions • Now, let’s go back and think about English yes-no questions, which we took originally to be motivation that movement occurs. • Bill will buy cheese. • Will Bill buy cheese? • What’s happening here? It is reasonable to think that the modal will, which starts out in I, moves to C in questions. • WilliBill ti buy cheese?

English yes-no questions CP • Why move I to C? • Since it seems to happen in questions and not in statements, and since C is often thought to be the part of the structure where “clause type” (question, statement, imperative, etc.) is recorded, this movement seems to be driven by the C we find in questions. • We write this as C as being [+Q]. C IP C Ii DP I will Bill [+Q] I VP ti buy cheese

Ø+Q • Incidentally, lots of languages have an audible question morpheme, which adds plausibility to our assumption that English has a question morpheme in C that is just null. • Akira ga hon o kaimasita ka? (Japanese)Akira top book acc bought Q‘Did Akira buy the book?’

English yes-no questions • Also notice that if there is an overt question morpheme there in English (which happens in embedded questions), there is no need to move I to C: • I asked if Bill will buy cheese. • *I asked (if) will Bill buy cheese. • Incidentally, if is also [+Q]—this indicates “interrogative”, and both Ø+Q and if mark interrogative clauses. But if doesn’t cause I to move to C.

I to C • In English, anything that would be in I moves to C. So, modals and auxiliaries all “invert” around the subject: • Will Bill buy cheese? • Is Bill buying cheese? • Has Bill bought cheese? • But main verbs never raise to I in English. Consider then: • Did Bill buy cheese?

I to C • Did Bill buy cheese? • Why is there a do there? Before, we only saw do in sentences with not, inserted because the tense affix couldn’t “reach” the verb, blocked by not. • What seems to be the case is that if I moves to C (that is, the past tense suffix -ed in this case), it also gets too far away from the verb (now Billis between the suffix and the verb), and Do-insertion is required for pronunciation. • -edi Bill ti buy cheese?

Negation • We’ve used negation as a test to see if the verb/auxiliary appears before it or after it as an indication of whether the verb has raised or not. We’ve also used adverbs (like often) this way. • Negation acts different from adverbs. For example, negation keeps the tense affix from being pronounced with a verb (in English), but adverbs don’t: • Bill didnot buy cheese. • Bill never buys cheese. • Bill quickly bought cheese. • Yet, both come between I and V in the underlying structure.

NegP • A common view of negation is that it has its own projection, a NegP, headed by a negative morpheme. For example, something like this. • Interestingly, negation sometimes comes “in two parts”, with two morphemes implicated in negation. NegP has in principle two positions available for negative morphemes, its specifier and its head. • Standard French ne…pasis an example of this which we’ll look at now. NegP Neg Neg

French negation • In standard French, the negation of a sentence generally involves a morpheme ne placed before the tensed verb and a morpheme pas placed after it, as in: • Jean ne mange pas des pommes.Jean NE eats NOT of.the apples‘Jean doesn’t eat apples.’ • However, English gives us reason to believe (assuming NegP is in the same place in the tree in both languages) that NegP comes between IP and VP: • Bill will not eat apples.

French negation • A common view of how French negation looks at DS is like this, with ne being a morpheme of category Neg, heading a NegP with pasin its specifier. • For the moment, we won’t concern ourselves with the categorial status of pas; clearly it must be an XP of some kind itself, maybe also of category Neg, but it never heads the main NegP in a sentence. I’ll write it just as pas in the specifier. IP DP I NegP I [PRES] pas Neg Neg VP ne V PP

French negation • How do we get the correct word order? • We know that V needs to move to I, but wouldn’t this yield: • Jean mange pas ne des pommes.? • You’d think so, yet the facts tell us that we actually get: • Jean ne mange pas des pommes. IP DP I NegP I [PRES] pas Neg Neg VP ne V PP

French negation • Suppose, however, that the verb moves first to Neg, and then moves up to I… • What will happen first is that the V will head-adjoin to Neg, creating a complex head… IP DP I NegP I [PRES] pas Neg Neg VP ne V PP

French negation • Note that we take ne to be a prefix (not a suffix), which means when we create the complex head, the verb adjoins on the right. • Now, the verb still needs to move to I, but it is attached to the Neg now… so the Neg moves to I. • Complex heads move as a unit. You can’t “dis-attach” a head from a complex head. IP DP I NegP I [PRES] pas Neg Neg VP Neg Vi ti PP ne

French negation • This final movement ends up with the verb close enough to the tense suffix to satisfy the requirement that tense have a verbal host, while at the same time “taking nealong” to get us the right word order. • Jean ne mange pas… IP DP I NegP I Negj I pas Neg [PRES] Neg Vi tj VP ne ti PP

French negation • So, we see that assuming that ne is the head of NegP in French (with pas in the specifier), and assuming that the verb “stops off” to attach to Neg before moving (now as a part of the complex Neg head) up to I, we get the right word order. • Note that, since *Jean mange pas ne des pommesis ungrammatical, we also know that the verb has to stop off at Neg on the way up.

Head Movement Constraint • This is an example which motivated the hypothesis that head movement is constrained by the Head Movement Constraint (or HMC) which says that when a head moves to another head, it cannot “skip” over a head inbetween. So, the reason the verb stops at Neg is because Neg is between where V began and I. • Head Movement ConstraintA head cannot move over another head.

Colloquial French? • It turns out that the negation morpheme ne that we suppose is the head of the NegP projection is actually generally optional (or even preferentially omitted in colloquial French)—yet pas doesn’t act any differently (i.e. it doesn’t get “picked up” by the verb on the way up to I instead of ne). • What this suggests is that colloquial French has a null morpheme which is the head of NegP—that pas is still in SpecNegP, but the head is Ø instead of ne.

English negation • A common view of English negation is actually an extension of this: Many researchers consider not to be in the specifier of NegP, with a null head. • [IP John I [NegP not ØNEG [VP is eating lunch]]] • [IP John I [NegP not ØNEG+isi [VPti eating lunch]]] • [IP John [isi+ØNEG]j [NegP not tj [VPti eating lunch]]]

English negation • [IP John [isi+ØNEG]j [NegP not tj [VPti eating lunch]]] • However, sometimes English negation does appear to be the head of NegP—when it’s “contracted” as -n’t. • Isn’t Bill hungry? • Cf. Is Bill not hungry? • Notice that when the verb moved to I and then to C, it seems to have carried negation along.

The Italian DP • In Italian, in many cases, there is simply an option (stylistically governed) as to whether you say The Gianni or just Gianni: • Gianni mi ha telefonato.Gianni me has telephoned‘Gianni called me up.’ • Il Gianni mi ha telefonato.the Gianni me has telephoned‘Gianni called me up.’

The Italian DP • However, there is a difference with respect to the order of adjectives and the noun depending on which one you use. • L’ antica Romathe ancient Rome‘Ancient Rome’ • *Antica Roma ancient Rome • Roma anticaRome ancient • E’venuto il vecchio Cameresi. • came the older Cameresi • *E’venuto vecchio Cameresi. • came older Cameresi • E’venuto Cameresi vecchio. • came Cameresi older

The Italian DP • But this makes perfect sense, if what is happening in the cases where there is no determiner is that the N is moving up to D (just like V moves up to I in the main clause), and when there is a determiner, the N stays put. • L’ antica Romathe ancient Rome • Roma antica *Antica RomaRome ancient ancient Rome DP D NP D+Ni NP AdjP ti …

Back to VSO • Now, let’s return to the question of VSO order in languages like Irish (remember that?). Recall that we started off with the observation that there isn’t any way to “generate VSO order” at DS using X-bar rules because V and O are sisters at DS. • However, now that we have verb movement at our disposal, we could certainly derive VSO like this: • DS:Subject Verb Object • SS:VerbiSubjecttiObject

Irish • In support of verb movement, consider: • Phóg Máire an lucharachán.kissed Mary the leprechaun‘Mary kissed the leprechaun.’ • Tá Máire ag-pógáil an lucharachán.Is Mary ing-kiss the leprechaun‘Mary is kissing the leprechaun.’ • We find that if an auxiliary occupies the verb slot at the beginning of the sentence, the main verb appears between the subject and verb—it remains, unmoved. • This suggests that deriving VSO from SVO is on the right track.

VSO order in Irish • Where is the verb moving to, though? • The verb ends up to the left of the subject, which in English we took to be movement to C: • Will Bill buy cheese? • A natural thing to suppose is that the verb moves to I and then to C in Irish to get VSO order.

VSO order in Irish • Except, consider these: • An bhfaca tú an madra?Q See you the dog‘Did you see the dog?’ • Duirt mé gur phóg Máire an lucharachán.Said I that kissed Mary the leprechaun‘I said that Mary kissed the leprechaun.’ • If the verb moves to C, where are anand gur?

VSO order in Irish • In English (and German and other languages) if there is something in C, the verb doesn’t move there (it doesn’t need to): • Is Bill hungry? • Should Bill be hungry? • I wonder if Bill is hungry. • But in Irish, we see an overt complementizer followed by VSO.

A VP-internal subject in Irish? • One possibility that this suggests is that the verb is only moving to T, but the subject is actually lower than T—and we have a place in our tree which hasn’t been used yet, the specifier of VP. • But what about English? We expect that DS looks pretty much the same across languages, so why does the subject seem to start in different places in Irish and English? CP C TP C T T+Vi VP DP V ti …

CAS LX 522 Syntax I