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Cyclic Selection: Auxiliaries Are Merged, Not Inserted.
- Source :
- Linguistic Inquiry; Spring2023, Vol. 54 Issue 2, p350-377, 28p
- Publication Year :
- 2023
-
Abstract
- Traditional approaches to verbal periphrasis (compound tenses) treat auxiliary verbs as lexical items that enter syntactic derivation like any other lexical item, via Selection/Merge. An alternative view is that auxiliary verbs are inserted into a previously built structure (e.g., Bach 1967 , Arregi 2000 , Embick 2000 , Cowper 2010 , Bjorkman 2011 , Arregi and Klecha 2015). Arguments for the insertion approach include auxiliaries' last-resort distribution and the fact that, in many languages, auxiliaries are not systematically associated with a given inflectional category (Bjorkman's (2011) "overflow" distribution). Here, I argue against the insertion approach. I demonstrate that the overflow pattern and last-resort distribution follow from Cyclic Selection (Pietraszko 2017)—a Merge counterpart of Cyclic Agree (Béjar and Rezac 2009). I also show that the insertion approach makes wrong predictions about compound tenses in Swahili, a language with overflow periphrasis. Under my approach, an auxiliary verb is a verbal head externally merged as a specifier of a functional head, such as T. It then undergoes m-merger with that head, instantiating an External-Merge version of Matushansky's (2006) conception of head movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00243892
- Volume :
- 54
- Issue :
- 2
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Linguistic Inquiry
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 162750123
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00439