The Syntax of Tenselessness: Tense/Mood/Aspect-agreeing Infinitivals (Studies in Generative Grammar [SGG], 92) - Hardcover

Wiklund, Anna-Lena

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3110190435 ISBN 13: 9783110190434

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter, 2007

Synopsis

Tense/Mood/Aspect-agreeing Infinitivals is an in-depth investigation of the syntax of verb-verb agreement phenomena in Swedish, including pseudocoordinations of the form John started and wrote 'John started writing' and double participles of the form John had been-able written 'John had been able to write'. Providing evidence from facts concerning extraction, locality, selection, and interpretation, the book argues that the relevant construction types all involve surface variants of "infinitives in disguise"; infinitivals that agree with the matrix clause in tense/mood/aspect. Arguments are presented in favour of taking the dependencies underlying the agreement to be instances of Agree between functional heads of the same label, a configuration that yields restructuring/clause-union. The main theoretical contributions of the book are two:
(i) Agreement is proportional to functional structure:
The possibility of "copying" a particular morphosyntactic form is contingent on the presence of the corresponding functional projection in the agreeing XP.
(ii) Size constancy between restructuring/non-restructuring infinitivals:
The category selected by a verb may remain constant between restructuring and non-restructuring configurations.

It is suggested that an important aspect of restructuring may be alternation between unmarked (negatively specified) features and unvalued varieties of the same features, capturing properties such as "tenselessness", "finitelessness", etc. of restructuring infinitivals. The book is an important contribution to the syntax of infinitival clauses, the syntax of clause-union/restructuring, and more generally to the syntax of agreement phenomena in natural language. In addition, it provides a general reference source for anyone interested in the syntax of Swedish and other Scandinavian languages.

About this title

About the Author

Anna-Lena Wiklund, University of Tromsø, Norway.

From the Back Cover

Tense/Mood/Aspect-agreeing Infinitivals is an in-depth investigation of verb-verb agreement phenomena in Swedish, including pseudocoordinations of the form John started and wrote 'John started writing' and double participles of the form John had been-able written 'John had been able to write'. The book presents two main claims: (i) The relevant construction types all involve "disguised infinitives" - infinitival clauses that agree with the matrix in tense/mood/aspect; (ii) The relevant verb-verb agreement is a surface reflex of Agree between functional heads of the same label, where the embedded head is underspecified with regard to feature value. The result is a restructuring configuration. Evidence in favour of these claims come from facts concerning extraction, selection, locality, interpretation, and licensing of adverbs. If the analysis proposed is correct, restructuring does not depend on the size of the complment, nor on a functional status of the matrix verb, but on the establishment of dependencies between the matrix and embedded clause. Data show that full restructuring is possible, even if the size of the complement is large. The book is an important contribution to the syntax of infinitivals, restructuring, and agreement in natural language.

Edition details

• Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3110190435
• ISBN 13: 9783110190434
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 238