Wat als een modaal alleen komt? Modale complementellipsis in het Nederlands vanuit de generatieve hoek.

This paper discusses contexts in which modal verbs occur without a verbal complement. Firstly, I present the properties of Dutch modal verbs and conclude that modals are not strictly speaking auxiliary verbs on a par with hebben 'have' and zijn 'be', but rather lexical verbs selecting a verbal complement. However, they also occur without such verbal complement and the current paper gives an overview of the various types of such 'naked' modal verbs that can be distinguished with respect to their syntactic properties, as the syntactic differences between them lead to different analyses. Some cases involve ellipsis,more specifically PF-deletion (Modal Complement Ellipsis), while in other cases the modals directly select a small clause or nominal phrase for their complement. Although the type involving ellipsis receives most attention, the paper gives an overview of the different types and focuses on the question of whether or not the modal selects a silent verbal complement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]