As we saw in
(1) | a. | * | We watch will that show. |
b. | We will never watch that show. | ||
c. | (Will you watch that show?) We will. |
The past tense, on the other hand, is expressed by a bound morpheme, ordinarily the suffix -ed, which combines with the verb to form a morphologically complex word.
(2) | a. | We watch-ed that show. | |
b. | * | We -ed never watch that show. | |
c. | * | (Did you watch that show?) We -ed. |
This dual expression of tense is typical of the Germanic language family, to which English belongs. In all of these languages, the future is expressed analytically (as two separate words), whereas the past is mostly2 expressed synthetically (as a single morphologically complex word).
The syntactic structure for sentences presented
in
In addition to presenting the basic facts concerning the verb raising parameter, we discuss a closely related and important topic in the grammar of English: the do support that is found in sentences negated with not (cf. He doesn't like okra with *He not likes okra). We then review crosslinguistic evidence that verb raising is linked (in ways that are still not fully understood) to the overt expression of subject-verb agreement, and we discuss the process by which the loss of agreement morphology in a language can result over time in the loss of verb raising.
The chapter concludes with a detailed case study of the verb raising
parameter and related issues in the history of English. As we will see,
the diachronic interplay of the principles of Universal Grammar with
several contingent language-particular developments has resulted in the
intricate web of facts related to the verb raising parameter that
characterizes modern standard English.
Verb raising: V moves to I in the syntax
The future tense in French
As just mentioned, in certain languages, the verb moves and adjoins to
Infl in the syntax. One such language is French, and we begin our
discussion of the verb raising parameter by considering the future tense
in French, which is formed by attaching suffixes to a verb's infinitive.
(3) | Future tense of chanter 'to sing' | Present tense of avoir 'to have' | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
je chanter-ai | 'I will sing' | j'ai | 'I have' | |||
tu chanter-as | 'you.sg will sing' | tu as | 'you.sg have' | |||
il, elle chanter-a | 'he, she will sing' | il, elle a | 'he, she has' | |||
nous chanter-ons | 'we will sing' | nous avons | 'we have' | |||
vous chanter-ez | 'you.pl will sing' | vous avez | 'you.pl have' | |||
ils, elles chanter-ont | 'they will sing' | ils, elles ont | 'they have' | |||
As is evident from (3), the future tense affixes are nearly identical to the present tense forms of the verb avoir 'to have', the only difference being that the affixes are truncated in the first and second person plural by comparison to the full two-syllable forms of avoir. This correspondence suggests that the future tense in French developed via a semantic shift from 'they have to V' to 'they will V'.3 In addition, and more immediately relevant for the present discussion, the originally free forms of avoir were reanalyzed as bound morphemes.4 The analytic roots of the synthetic French future tense thus indicate that the two ways of expressing tense (analytic or synthetic) are not just semantically parallel, but that they are also morphologically more closely related than might appear at first glance. The elementary trees for the future tense suffixes in (3) can be schematically represented as in (4a), where the vertical bars express sets of mutually exclusive linguistic feature values (1, 2, 3 for person and sg, pl for number). (4b) instantiates the scheme for the 1st person plural.
(4) | a. | b. |
Given elementary trees like (4), sentences like (5) can be derived as follows.
(5) | Nous chanter-ons une chanson. we sing fut a song 'We will sing a song.' |
We begin with the elementary tree for the verb chanter in (6a) and substitute it as the complement of (4b) to yield the structure in (6b).
(6) | a. | b. | |||||
Elementary tree for chanter | Substitute (6a) in elementary tree (4b) |
The verb then moves and left-adjoins to the Infl node, as shown in (7).
(7) | a. | b. | |||||
Select I as target of adjunction | Left-adjoin V to I |
The remaining steps of the derivation, shown in (8), are identical to the ones that would be required to derive the corresponding English sentence We will sing a song.
(8) | a. | b. | |||||
Substitute subject and object | Move subject |
Finally, the structure in (8b) is handed over to the morphological
component, where the combination of chanter and the future tense
affix is spelled out as chanterons.
It is worth noting that our use of the adjunction operation here here
differs in certain respects from our use of it
in
(9) | Use of adjunction for ... | Modification | Head movement | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adjunction structure represents ... | Semantic restriction of modifiee by modifier | Morphological relation between stem and affix | |||
Target of adjunction | Intermediate projection | Head | |||
Adjoined node | Maximal projection | Head | |||
(= Movement involved?) | No | Yes | |||
In reading the following section, it may be helpful to bear in mind that our focus is not on the distribution of adverbs per se. In particular, we are not claiming that all, or even most, adverbs left-adjoin to V' in French; in fact, there are many that right-adjoin. Rather, the idea is to use the particular subset of adverbs that left-adjoin to V' as a diagnostic tool to determine the position of finite verbs in French. |
The facts of French presented so far are consistent with a verb raising analysis, but do not provide conclusive evidence in favor of it. In other words, nothing in what we have said so far prevents the French verb from remaining in situ and not combining with tense until the morphology. In this section, we present conclusive evidence in favor of the verb raising analysis that is based on the order of verbs and adverbs (Emonds 1978).
As illustrated in (10)-(12), there are certain adverbs in French (underlined) that ordinarily precede the main verb of a sentence (in boldface), rather than follow it. (Strictly speaking, à peine is a PP; what is relevant for the purposes of the argument is not its syntactic category, but rather its syntactic distribution.)
(10) | a. | Elle va à peine travailler trois heures. she goes hardly work three hours 'She is going to hardly work three hours.' | |
b. | Mon ami va complètement perdre la tête. my friend goes completely lose the head 'My friend is going to completely lose his head.' | ||
c. | Je vais presque oublier mon nom. I go almost forget my name 'I'm going to almost forget my name.' | ||
(11) | a. | * | Elle va travailler à peine trois heures. |
b. | * | Mon ami va perdre complètement la tête. | |
c. | * | Je vais oublier presque mon nom. | |
(12) | a. | * | Elle va travailler trois heures à peine. |
b. | * | Mon ami va perdre la tête complètement. | |
c. | * | Je vais oublier mon nom presque. |
The word order facts in (10)-(12) follow straightforwardly if we assume that the adverbs in question must adjoin to the left of V', as shown schematically in (13), rather than to the right.
As highlighted by the grammaticality contrast in (i),
expressions in one language don't necessarily behave syntactically
like their translation equivalents in another.
|
(13) |
Participles pattern analogously to infinitives, as shown in (14)-(16).
(14) | a. | Elle avait à peine travaillé trois heures. she had hardly worked three hours 'She had hardly worked three hours.' | |
b. | Mon ami a complètement perdu la tête. my friend has completely lost the head 'My friend completely lost his head.' | ||
c. | J'avais presque oublié mon nom. I had almost forgotten my name 'I had almost forgotten my name.' | ||
(15) | a. | * | Elle avait travaillé à peine trois heures. |
b. | * | Mon ami a perdu complètement la tête. | |
c. | * | J'avais oublié presque mon nom. | |
(16) | a. | * | Elle avait travaillé trois heures à peine. |
b. | * | Mon ami a perdu la tête complètement. | |
c. | * | J'avais oublié mon nom presque. |
Moreover, the negative marker pas behaves like an adverb in French.5
(17) | a. | Nous allons (ne) pas écouter la radio. we go NE not listen the radio 'We are going to not listen to the radio.' | |
b. | * | Nous allons (n') écouter pas la radio. | |
c. | * | Nous allons (n') écouter la radio pas. | |
(18) | a. | Nous (n') avons pas écouté la radio. we NE have not listened the radio 'We haven't listened to the radio.' | |
b. | * | Nous (n') avons écouté pas la radio. | |
c. | * | Nous (n') avons écouté la radio pas. |
However, when the the main verb of the sentence is finite, the adverb-verb order that is obligatory with infinitives and participles is ungrammatical.
(19) | a. | * | Elle à peine travaillera trois heures. she hardly work.fut.3sg three hours 'She will hardly work three hours.' |
b. | * | Mon ami complètement perdra la tête. my friend completely lose.fut.3sg the head 'My friend will completely lose his head.' | |
c. | * | Je presque oublierai mon nom. I almost forget.fut.1sg my name 'I will almost forget my name.' | |
d. | * | Nous (ne) pas écouterons la radio. we NE not listen.fut.1pl the radio 'We won't listen to the radio.' |
Instead, the adverb must follow the verb, although it still cannot follow the entire V'.
(20) | a. | Elle travaillera à peine trois heures. | |
b. | Mon ami perdra complètement la tête. | ||
c. | J'oublierai presque mon nom. | ||
d. | Nous (n') écouterons pas la radio. | ||
(21) | a. | * | Elle travaillera trois heures à peine. |
b. | * | Mon ami perdra la tête complètement. | |
c. | * | J'oublierai mon nom presque. | |
d. | * | Nous (n') écouterons la radio pas. |
Table 1 summarizes the facts just presented in (10)-(12) and (14)-(21).
Table 1: Adverb placement by finiteness of verb in French AdvP > verb ... verb > AdvP ... verb > XP > AdvP verb is nonfinite, as in (10)-(12), (14)-(18) ✓ * * verb is finite, as in (19)-(21) * ✓ *
As already noted in connection with (10)-(12), the adverb placement facts for nonfinite verbs are straightforwardly expected under the assumption that the diagnostic adverbs left-adjoin to V'. This assumption also explains the rightmost judgment for finite verbs (the blue star in row 2). The judgments highlighted in red, which are the opposite of their green counterparts in the row above, seem puzzling at first glance. But they too follow straightforwardly if we assume that finite verbs obligatorily move to I in French, as in (22a).
(22) | a. | b. | |||||
Verb raising yields FinV > Adv (grammatical in French) | No verb raising yields Adv > FinV (ungrammatical in French) |
If French did not require finite verbs to move to I, as in the hypothetical scenario represented in (22b), it is difficult to see how the contrast between the green and the red cells in Table 1 could be derived in a principled way.
As (23) and (24) show, the adverb facts for other simple tenses is parallel to those for the future tense, and it is therefore natural to extend the verb raising analysis to them as well.
(23) | a. | Elle travaillait à peine trois heures. she work.imperf.3sg hardly three hours 'She used to hardly work three hours.' | |
b. | Mon ami perd complètement la tête. my friend lose.pres.3sg completely the head 'My friend is completely losing his head.' | ||
c. | J' oublie presque mon nom. I forget.pres.1sg almost my name 'I am almost forgetting my name.' | ||
d. | Nous (n') écoutions pas la radio. we NE listen.imperf.1pl not the radio 'We weren't listening to the radio.' | ||
(24) | a. | * | Elle à peine travaillait trois heures. |
b. | * | Mon ami complètement perd la tête. | |
c. | * | Je presque oublie mon nom. | |
d. | * | Nous (ne) pas écoutions la radio. |
In concluding our discussion of French, we draw your attention to the
fact that verb movement, just like subject movement
in Having established that French exhibits verb raising in the syntax,
we now investigate the corresponding English facts, using exactly the
same tool that we used in French - namely, the position of diagnostic
adverbs. As in French, certain adverbs in English obligatorily precede
nonfinite verbs.
Tense lowering: I moves to V in the morphology
The order of diagnostic adverbs and verbs in English
(25) | a. | They will { almost, hardly, never } fail. | |
b. | They have { almost, hardly, never } failed. | ||
(26) | a. | * | They will fail { almost, hardly, never. } |
b. | * | They have failed { almost, hardly, never. } |
But unlike in French, these adverbs precede the main verb of a sentence even when the verb is finite.
(27) | a. | They { almost, hardly, never } failed. | |
b. | * | They failed { almost, hardly, never. } |
The ungrammaticality of (27b) means that the verb raising analysis that is successful for French is exactly wrong for English. Instead, English finite verbs remain in situ in the syntax and tense lowers and adjoins to V in the morphology. The syntactic input to the morphology is identical to the one that is ungrammatical in French - namely (22b), repeated here as (28). Here and in what follows, we do not explicitly indicate the morphological lowering.
(28) | |||
Morphological tense lowering yields Adv > V (grammatical in English regardless of finiteness of V) |
In vernacular English, never often functions as a sentence negator equivalent to simple 'not', without its literal meaning of 'not ever'.
(31) | a. | Did you get a chance to talk to Tom at the party? | ||
b. | Nope, I never got a chance. |
But despite their functional equivalence in contexts like (31), not and never differ from each other in a striking way: not obligatorily triggers do support, whereas never doesn't. (All forms of do in this section are to be read without emphatic stress.)
(32) | a. | * | He not applied. |
b. | He { did not, didn't } apply. | ||
(33) | a. | He never applied. | |
b. | * | He did never apply. |
In order to explain this puzzling fact, we present an analysis of
do support that relies on two main ideas: first,
that never and not are integrated into the structure of
English sentences in different ways, and second, that Universal Grammar
allows tense lowering in the morphology only under certain structural
conditions.6
A syntactic difference between never and not.
As shown in (34), never is intransitive and hence a maximal
projection in its own right, whereas not is transitive and hence
not a phrase on its own.
(34) | a. | b. |
There are several pieces of evidence for this distinction. The
first comes from negative inversion, a construction reminiscent
of the so am I construction
discussed in
(35) | a. | They would accept no present more happily. | |
b. | No present would they accept more happily. |
An important property of this construction is that the material preceding the auxiliary must be a maximal projection. Thus, in contrast to the DP no present in (35b), the head of the DP, the negative determiner no, cannot undergo negative inversion on its own.
(36) | * | No would they accept present more willingly. |
Bearing in mind this fact about negative inversion, consider the canonical and negative inversion sentences in (37).
(37) | a. | They will never tolerate this mess. | |
b. | Never will they tolerate this mess. |
(38) illustrates the beginning of the derivation of (37a). (38a) is the structure for the positive sentence corresponding to (37a). Adjoining never as a verbal modifier yields (38b).
(38) | a. | b. |
As noted earlier, we discuss the structure for sentences with
inversion in
Now consider the not variant of (37a) in (39).
(39) | They will not tolerate this mess. |
Under the reasonable assumption that Infl can take either NegP or VP complements, (39) receives the structure in (40).
(40) |
In this structure, not on its own is not a maximal projection, and so not, like no but unlike never, should not be able to undergo negative inversion. As (41) shows, this expectation is confirmed.
(41) | * | Not will they tolerate this mess. |
A second piece of evidence for the status of not (and its variant n't) as a transitive head comes from the fact that it optionally adjoins to I, forming a complex head that can exhibit morphological irregularities. Specifically, when n't raises to shall and will, the result is spelled out as shan't and won't, respectively. Moreover, nonstandard English allows the combination of n't with various forms of the aspectual auxiliaries be and have to be spelled out as ain't. Such irregular forms are typical of what is possible when two heads combine, whether in the syntax or in the morphology. Comparable examples arise in connection with irregular past tense forms in English, where the combination of two heads like sing and past tense is spelled out as irregular sang. Other well-known examples from languages other than English include the idiosyncratic spellouts for preposition-determiner combinations like those in (42).
(42) | a. | French | à + le > au; à + les > aux; de + le > du; de + les > des; to the.m.sg to the.pl of the.m.sg of the.pl | |
b. | German | an + dem > am; in + dem > im; zu + dem > zum; zu + der > zur to the.m.dat.sg in the.m.dat.sg to the.m.dat.sg to the.f.dat.sg | ||
c. | Italian | con + il > col; in + il > nel; su + il > sul with the.m.sg in the.m.sg on the.m.dat.sg | ||
d. | Portuguese | por + o > pelo for the.m.sg |
A constraint on tense lowering in the morphology. We turn now to the second piece of our solution to the puzzle presented by the contrast between (32) and (33), repeated here as (43) and (44).
(43) | a. | * | He not applied. |
b. | He { did not, didn't } apply. | ||
(44) | a. | He never applied. | |
b. | * | He did never apply. |
The idea is that tense lowering in the morphology is subject to the locality condition in (45).
(45) | When a head A lowers onto a head B in the morphology, A and B must be in a local relation in the sense that no projection of a head distinct from A and B intervenes on the path of branches that connects A and B. |
The notion of intervene is defined as in (46).
(46) | An element C, C distinct from A and B (and projections of A and B), intervenes between two elements A and B iff (= if and only if) A (or some projection of A) dominates C and C (or some projection of C) dominates B. |
It is important to understand that intervention is defined not in terms of linear precedence, but in terms of the structural relation 'dominate.' This means that the place to look for whether the locality condition in (45) is satisfied or violated is not the string of terminal nodes beginning with A and ending with B, but the path of branches that connects A with B in the tree.
The structure for (44a) is given in (47). In this structure, tense lowering is consistent with the locality condition in (45), since adjoining never at V' results in the adverb being too low in the tree to intervene between I and V. (In other words, AdvP isn't part of the green path from I to V.)
(47) |
In the structure in (48a), on the other hand, tense lowering would violate the locality condition because the red projections of Neg intervene on the path between I and V, indicated in green. As a result, only the do support variant of (48a) is grammatical, which is shown in (48b). It's true that the intermediate and the maximal projections of Neg intervene between I and V in (48b) as well, but forms of do are free morphemes. Therefore, unlike tense affixes, they don't need to undergo tense lowering onto V to form a well-formed morphological word. Since (45) is a constraint on tense lowering, not a constraint on syntactic trees in general, (48b) does not violate it.
(48) | a. | b. |
In this section, the Icelandic characters eth (capital Ð, lowercase ð) and thorn (capital Þ, lowercase þ) represent the voiced and voiceless 'th' sounds in this, eth and thin, thorn, respectively. |
Our discussion so far has treated verb raising in the syntax and
tense lowering in the morphology as two symmetrical parametric options
provided by Universal Grammar. However, the languages in which the two
options have been studied in greatest detail -
the Germanic
and Romance languages - suggest that they are ranked and
that it is verb raising that is preferred, all other things being
equal.7
Of course, we need to take into account that in this case, as in
life generally, all other things aren't equal. Among the Germanic and
Romance languages, we can distinguish two groups, which have to do with
the expression of subject agreement on finite verbs.8 All of these languages resemble
English in distinguishing three grammatical persons and
two grammatical numbers (singular and plural). In principle, therefore,
a language might have six
We focus on the number of distinctions that are made in speech, because that is what children hear. They only learn to read and write later on, once language acquisition is essentially over. |
(49) | Verb paradigms in rich agreement languages | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Italian | Spanish | French | Icelandic | Yiddish | ||||
'I speak' | 'I speak' | 'I will speak' | 'I say' | 'I say' | ||||
1 sg | parl-o | habl-o | parler-ai | seg-i | zog | |||
2 sg | parl-i | habl-as | parler-a[s] | seg-ir | zog-st | |||
3 sg | parl-a | habl-a | parler-a | seg-ir | zog-t | |||
1 pl | parl-iamo | habl-amos | parler-on[s] | segj-um | zog-n | |||
2 pl | parl-ate | habl-áis | parler-e[z] | seg-ið | zog-t | |||
3 pl | parl-ano | habl-an | parler-on[t] | segj-a | zog-n | |||
By contrast, the mainland Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) exhibit no agreement morphology at all, even with a verb like 'be', which in English preserves agreement distinctions that are not expressed elsewhere in the language. For ordinary verbs, English expresses only one distinction in the present tense and none at all in the past tense. (50) gives some paradigms for these poor agreement languages.
(50) | Verb paradigms in poor agreement languages | ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Danish | Swedish | English | |||||||
'I throw' | 'I am' | 'I throw' | 'I am' | 'I throw' | 'I am' | ||||
1 sg | kaster | er | kaster | är | throw | am | |||
2 sg | '' | '' | '' | '' | '' | are | |||
3 sg | '' | '' | '' | '' | throw-s | is | |||
1 pl | '' | '' | '' | '' | throw | are | |||
2 pl | '' | '' | '' | '' | '' | '' | |||
3 pl | '' | '' | '' | '' | '' | '' | |||
In rich agreement languages, as we have already seen for French,
finite verbs raise to I and hence precede diagnostic adverbs and
negation. This is illustrated for Icelandic and Yiddish in (51) and
(52). As earlier, the verb is in boldface and precedes the diagnostic
adverbs and negation. As usual with Germanic, the examples are in the
form of subordinate clauses because main clauses in Germanic introduce a
complication - briefly mentioned for Dutch and German
in
(51) | a. | Icelandic | að Jón keypti { ekki, aldrei, raunverulega } bókina that Jón bought not never actually book.def 'that Jón { didn't buy, never bought, actually bought } the book' | |
b. | Yiddish | az zey redn ( nit, avade, mistome } mame-loshn that they speak not certainly probably mother-tongue 'that they { don't, certainly, probably } speak Yiddish' | ||
(52) | a. | * | að Jón { ekki, aldrei, raunverulega } keypti bókina | |
b. | * | az zey { nit, avade, mistome } redn mame-loshn |
In poor agreement languages, on the other hand, tense lowers onto the verb in the morphology; in this case, the finite verb follows diagnostic adverbs, including simple negation. (53) and (54) illustrate this for Danish and Swedish.
(53) | a. | Danish | at Peter { ikke, ofte } drikker kaffe om morgenen that Peter not often drinks coffee in morning.def 'that Peter { doesn't drink, often drinks } coffee in the morning' | |
b. | Swedish | att Ulf { inte, faktiskt } köpte boken that Ulf not actually bought book.def 'that Ulf { didn't buy, actually bought } the book' | ||
(54) | a. | * | at Peter drikker { ikke, ofte } kaffe om morgenen | |
b. | * | att Ulf köpte { inte, faktiskt } boken |
As the absence of do support in (53) and (54) shows, the translation counterpart of not has a different status in Mainland Scandinavian than it does in English. In particular, it is an ordinary intransitive adverb, as evidenced by the availability of negative inversion in (55a),9 and so there is no need for do support in these languages. (As (55b) shows, negation is also an ordinary adverb in Icelandic, where finite verbs move upward to Infl past ekki just as they do past pas in French.)
(55) | a. | Swedish | Inte vet jag var hon bor. not know I where she lives 'I don't know where she lives.' | |
b. | Icelandic | Ekki veit ég hvar hún býr. not know I where she lives |
We know of no rich agreement languages with tense lowering in the morphology. Related to this is the fact that languages that lose rich agreement also tend to lose verb raising over time. Although we do not know why this correlation between richness of agreement and verb raising should hold, it suggests that children acquiring a language prefer the parametric option of verb raising in the syntax over tense lowering in the morphology, but only if they are able to detect sufficient cues for it in the sentences that they hear. In Germanic and Romance, the cues for the verb raising option are twofold: on the one hand, richness of agreement, and on the other, the word order that results from verb raising (finite verb > adverb). If the language being acquired has rich agreement, then the cues for the verb raising option are extremely robust. This is because virtually every sentence that the child hears contains the agreement cue, which is further reinforced by the word order cue in those sentences that contain adverbs. Under these conditions, children acquire the verb raising option without difficulty. On the other hand, given a language with poor agreement and without cues from word order, the idea is that children are simply unable to acquire the verb raising option.
What happens in a language in which agreement is being lost? In
such a language, agreement first becomes variable (that is, some
sentences contain agreement, whereas other do not) and then is lost
entirely. Thus, the cues from rich agreement become less frequent over
time, and children acquiring the language become increasingly dependent
on the word order cue. But since not every sentence contains adverbs of
the relevant sort, the cues for the verb raising option in a language
that is losing rich agreement are nowhere near as robust as in a
language with stable rich agreement. This means that although it is
possible in principle for children to acquire the verb raising option,
at least some children might instead fail to acquire it (all other
things being equal). Such children would no longer produce sentences in
which the finite verb precedes the adverb. Instead, they would produce
adverb-verb orders, which are errors from the point of view of the verb
raising grammar, but the only option that the tense lowering grammar
generates. Thus, the relative frequency of the word order cue would
decrease yet further, in turn decreasing the chance of other children
acquiring the verb raising option. Such a feedback mechanism would
predict an overall tendency over time for the verb raising option to
disappear from the language. During a period of transition, the old
parametric option might continue to be used alongside the new one - for
instance, in formal usage. But for speakers who have acquired tense
lowering in early childhood, verb raising would never be as natural as
tense lowering, and so the new parametric option would tend to supplant
the old one even in formal usage.
These developments have been tracked in some detail in the history
of the Scandinavian languages. In Swedish, agreement begins to be lost
in the 1400s, and the earliest tense lowering examples are from the late
part of that century. During a transition period from 1500 to 1700,
both verb raising and tense lowering are attested, sometimes even in the
same text (as in the (b) examples in (56) and (57)).
(56) | a. | Verb raising | at Gudz ord kan ey vara j honom that God's word can not be in him 'that God's word cannot be in him' | |
b. | när thet är ey stenoghth when it is not stony 'when it is not stony' | |||
(57) | a. | Tense lowering | om den dristigheten än skulle wara onågigtt uptagen if that boldness yet would be amiss taken 'if that boldness would yet be taken amiss' | |
b. | wm annar sywkdom ey krenker nokon if another illness not ails someone 'if someone isn't afflicted with another illness' |
Finally, after 1700, the verb raising option in Swedish dies out completely.
The geographically more isolated Faroese is at the very tail end of the same change. Agreement has weakened in Faroese, and speakers do not ordinarily produce verb raising sentences. However, when asked to give grammaticality judgments, many speakers accept both word orders in (58), characterizing the verb raising variant in (58b) as archaic.
(58) | a. | Tense lowering (vernacular) | Hann spur, hvi tad ikki eru fleiri tilikar samkomur. he asks why there not are more such gatherings 'He asks why there aren't more such gatherings.' | |
b. | Verb raising (archaic) | Hann spur, hvi tad eru ikki fleiri tilikar samkomur. |
Interestingly, there is at least one dialect of Swedish, the dialect
of Älvdalen, that
has retained agreement (the paradigm for kasta 'throw' is:
(59) | a. | um du for int gar ita ia firi brado if you get not done this before breakfast 'if you don't get this done before breakfast' | |
b. | fast die uar int ieme if they were not home 'if they weren't home' | ||
c. | ba fo dye at uir uildum int fy om just because that we would not follow him 'just because we wouldn't follow him' |
The characters eth (capital Ð, lowercase ð) and thorn (capital Þ, lowercase þ) were borrowed from Old Norse and used in Old and Middle English where we use 'th' today. The yogh character (ȝ) was used where we use 'g' or 'y' today. |
This section gives a brief review of the history of the verb raising parameter in English.10 As we will see, this part of the grammar of modern English is the culmination of one of the most complicated chapters in the entire history of the language, and it reflects several distinct but interlocking developments, which include:
For the purposes of the exam, you are not expected to know the full
details of the present section, but only the gist of it as summarized in
this box.
|
In Middle English, the period of the language that lasted from about 1150 to 1500, verbs exhibited roughly as much person-number agreement as in modern French, as illustrated in (60). Silent letters are enclosed in square brackets.
(60) | Verb tense paradigms in two dialects of Middle English and two tenses in French | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Southern 'I sing' | Midlands 'I sing' | French 'I sing' | French 'I will sing' | ||||
1 sg | sing-e | sing-e | chant-[e] | chanter-ai | |||
2 sg | sing-est | sing-est | chant-[es] | chanter-a[s] | |||
3 sg | sing-eþ | sing-eþ | chant-[e] | chanter-a | |||
1 pl | '' | sing-en | chant-on[s] | chanter-on[s] | |||
2 pl | '' | '' | chant-e[z] | chanter-e[z] | |||
3 pl | '' | '' | chant-[ent] | chanter-on[t] | |||
Given its richness of agreement, we would expect Middle English to exhibit verb raising, and so it did. As the examples in (61)-(63) show, the finite verb moved to I across both adverbs and negation, just as it does in French, Icelandic, and Yiddish. The Middle English examples here and below are from the second edition of the Penn Parsed Corpus of Middle English (Kroch and Taylor 2000a).11
(61) | a. | always | he weneth alwey that he may do thyng that he may nat do.
(cmctmeli,222.C1.193) 'he always thinks that he can do things that he can't do' | |
b. | for þe Britons destroiede alwai þe cristen peple
þat seynt Austyne hade baptisede
(cmbrut3,98.2951) 'for the Britons always killed the Christians that St. Austin had baptized' | |||
c. | þe ȝong man resortyd alwey to þe preste
(cmkempe,57.1270) 'the young man always resorted to the priest' | |||
(62) | a. | never | for God ... ȝeueþ neuer two tymes to-geder
(cmcloud,20.115) 'for God ... never gives two times together' | |
b. | and y ne seiȝ neuer þe ryȝtful for-saken
(cmearlps,44.1880) 'and I have never seen (lit. not saw never) the righteous forsaken' | |||
b. | he thought he sawe never so grete a knyght
(cmmalory,180.2434) 'he thought he had never seen so great a knight' | |||
c. | for þey synneden neuere.
(cmwycser,234.204) 'for they never sinned.' | |||
(63) | a. | not | This emperour Claudius was so obliuiows þat, sone aftir he had killid
his wyf, he asked why sche cam not to soper.
(cmcapchr,49.534) 'This emperor Claudius was so oblivious that, soon after he had killed his wife, he asked why she didn't come to supper.' | |
b. | He mad eke a precept þat no Jew into Jerusalem schuld entre,
but Cristen men he forbade not þe entre.
(cmcapchr,52.604-605) 'He also made a law that no Jew should enter into Jerusalem, but he did not forbid Christians from entering (lit. the entry).' | |||
c. | Ich ne hidde nouȝt þy mercy
(cmearlps,49.2107) 'I did not hide your mercy' (lit. not hid not) | |||
d. | Bott I sawe noght synne.
(cmjulnor,60.289) 'But I did not see sin.' | |||
e. | but he wythdrowe not hir temptacyon
(cmkempe,16.321) 'but he did not withdraw her temptation' | |||
f. | but Balyn dyed not tyl the mydnyghte after.
(cmmalory,69.2361) 'but Balyn did not die till the midnight after.' |
In the course of Middle English, several syntactic developments took
place that culminated in the complex grammar of modern English with
respect to the verb raising parameter. First, by 1500, the beginning of
Early Modern English, the agreement system of Middle English was
simplified, and as we would expect given what we know of the history of
Scandinavian, verb raising was lost as well. For instance, between 1475
and 1525, the frequency of verb raising dropped from roughly 65% to 10%.
In the case of adverbs, the loss of verb raising simply led to the
modern word order adverb > finite verb, as is evident from the
translations for (61) and (62). But the effects of the loss of verb
raising in the case of negation were more complicated and involved two
further changes: a change in the status of not and the emergence
of do support. We discuss these changes in turn.
Negative inversion.
There is good evidence that in early Middle English not was an
ordinary adverb on a par with never and French pas. Like
never and negative phrases throughout the history of English, it
could undergo negative inversion.
A change in the status of not
(64) | a. | & nohht ne stannt itt stille (cmorm,I,125.1079) and not NE stood it still 'and it didn't stand still' | |
b. | Acc nohht ne mihht itt oppnenn hemm Þe ȝate off heoffness blisse (cmorm,I,142.1171) and not NE might it open them the gate of heaven's bliss 'and it could not open the gate of heaven's bliss for them' |
In the absence of further developments, we would therefore expect the loss of verb raising in ordinary sentences to result in a word order change from verb > not to not > verb, as happened in mainland Scandinavian. However, in contrast to negation in Scandinavian, not in the course of Middle English went from being an ordinary intransitive adverb to being a transitive head. As a result, as mentioned earlier in the chapter, the modern English counterparts of (64) are ungrammatical, as shown in (65).
(65) | a. | * | Not did it stand still. |
b. | * | Not could it open the gates of heaven's bliss for them. |
Adjunction to I'. There is a further piece of evidence that not changed from an intransitive head to a transitive a head in the course of Middle English. In early Middle English, not could adjoin not just to V', but also to I'.
(66) | a. | Þatt Jesuss nohht ne wollde Ben borenn nowwhar i þe land (cmorm,I,122.1052) that Jesus not NE wanted be born nowhere in the land 'that Jesus did not want to be born anywhere in the land' | |
b. | ða þinges ðe hie naht ne scolden ȝiuen. (cmvices1,139.1728) the things that they not NE should give 'the things that they shouldn't give' |
In this respect, not resembled never and other adverbs, which have preserved this ability to this day, as shown in (67).12
(67) | a. | Middle English | he swore þat Saxones neuer shulde haue pees ne reste (cmbrut3,69.2088) | |
'he swore that the Saxons never should have peace or rest' | ||||
b. | Modern English | He { always, never } will admit his shortcomings. |
However, as it developed from an intransitive to a transitive head, not lost the ability to adjoin to I' in the course of Middle English, with the result that the Modern English counterparts of (66) are ungrammatical, as shown in (68).
(68) | a. | * | that Jesus not would be born anywhere in the land |
b. | * | the things that they not should give |
This is consistent with the elementary tree for Modern
English not that we give it in (34b), where it is a transitive
head that takes a VP complement, forcing it to appear lower in the tree
than required to generate the word order in (68).
The emergence of do support
The reanalysis of not from an ordinary adverb to a head was
essentially complete by
1400,13 and shortly
thereafter, the first examples of the contracted form n't are
attested, as we might expect. Agreement began to weaken around this
time. What consequences did this have for children acquiring sentences
containing
not in early Middle English? On the one hand, the rich agreement
cues for verb raising were weakening, but on the other hand, the new
status of not as a head ruled out tense lowering in sentences
containing not. In other words, in the absence of any other
developments, ordinary negative sentences would have
become ineffable.
One can imagine a number of different resolutions to such an
impasse, each of them representing a particular possible accident of
history. For instance, speakers might have begun using the adverb
never to take over the function of the negative head not.
In fact, this did happen in the vernacular, as we saw in (31), but it
never became the only way of expressing negation. Alternatively,
children might have managed to acquire verb raising solely on the
strength of the word order cue in sentences containing not. These
sentences might have become particularly salient because of the
ineffability of their tense-lowering counterparts. As we will see, verb
raising is preserved in connection with the auxiliary verbs have
and be. In the case of ordinary verbs, however, what actually
happened in the history of English was something that depended on an
unrelated development in the language that had taken place in the 1200s:
the development of the verb do into a modal.
Like many languages, Middle English had a construction (no longer
available in Modern English) involving a causative verb and a lower
verb, in which the lower verb's agent could be left
unexpressed.14 We first
illustrate this construction, which has since been lost from English,
for French and German in (69). The causative verb is in boldface, and
the lower verb is in italics.
(69) | a. | French | Edouard a fait assembler une grande armée. Edward has made assemble a great army 'Edward had a great army assembled.' (lit. 'Edward had (someone) assemble a great army.') |
In Middle English, two different causative verbs were used in this construction depending on the dialect. The East Midlands dialect used do, as illustrated in (70), whereas the West Midlands dialect used make. In other words, the West Midlands equivalent of (70a) would have been (using modern spelling) Edward made assemble a great host.
(70) | a. | Middle English (East Midlands) | Kyng Edwarde dede assemble a grete hoste
(cmbrut3,112.3377) 'King Edward had a great army assembled' (lit. 'King Edward had (someone) assemble a great army.') | |
b. | This Constantin ded clepe a gret councel at Constantinople
(cmcapchr,81.1483) 'This Constantine had a great council called at Constantinople' (lit. 'This Constantine had (someone) call a great council at Constantinople') | |||
c. | He ded make ferþingis and halfpenies, whech were not
used before (cmcapchr,128.2962) 'He had farthings and halfpennies made, which weren't used before' (lit. 'He had (someone) make farthings and halfpennies') |
Now in many discourse contexts, causative sentences like The king had a great army assembled are used more or less interchangeably with simple sentences like The king assembled a great army. (In the first case, we zoom in, as it were, on the details of the situation - the king gets someone else to do the actual legwork of assembling the army, whereas in the second case, we zoom out, ignoring the fact that the king isn't running around himself.) As a result, in situations of dialect contact, it was possible for West Midlands speakers (those with causative make) to misinterpret sentences with causative do from the East Midlands dialect as an alternative way of saying the corresponding simple sentence. Based on this misinterpretation, they might then themselves have begun to use do, but as an auxiliary verb bleached of its causative content rather than as a causative verb (for which they would have continued to use their own make). Since the border between the East and West Midlands dialects runs diagonally through England, the chances of dialect contact and of the reinterpretation and adoption of do as an auxiliary verb were good. In any event, however it came to pass, it is West Midlands speakers who first used do as an auxiliary verb. Once the auxiliary use was established, it could then have spread to other dialects, especially in big cities like London, where people came from many different dialect backgrounds and where dialect distinctions were leveled as a result.
What is important from a syntactic point of view is that auxiliary
do occurred rarely before 1400. However, when agreement weakened
and verb raising began to be lost, auxiliary do was increasingly
pressed into service since it allowed the ever-increasing number of
speakers with the tense lowering grammar to produce negative sentences
with not.
In modern English, the do of do support is a modal (=
I) rather than an auxiliary (= V) (see Modals and auxiliary verbs in English for further
details concerning the distinction between modals and auxiliaries).
What we have just been calling auxiliary do must either have
entered the language as a modal or been reanalyzed as one early on,
since as an auxiliary verb, it would have to combine with tense and
would thus, in the tense lowering grammar, run afoul of exactly the
locality constraint that it actually helped to circumvent. In any
event, the do of do support was one of a growing number of
modals in Middle English that developed out of an earlier class of
auxiliary verbs. Historically, many members of this class exhibited
morphological peculiarities, and some of them were already syntactically
special from the very beginning of Middle English. For
instance, must and shall never occur as nonfinite forms in
Middle English. Children acquiring these vocabulary items (what we
might call premodals) would therefore never have encountered evidence
that they moved from V to I (as they do in the case of Modern English
auxiiary have and be). The children might instead have
assigned these items to the syntactic category I from the get-go, and so
they might already have been modals in early Middle English.
Consider now the effect of the loss of verb raising on the status of
any premodals that were still members of the syntactic category V. In
particular, consider a structure like (71) (we assume that the premodals,
just like modals, took VP complements).
The emergence of modals
(71) |
In the outgoing verb raising grammar, the finite modal can combine with tense even in the presence of negation because verb raising is not subject to the locality constraint on morphological tense lowering. For examples like (72), this yields a schematic derivation as in (73).
(72) | yef sho wil noht do it (cmbenrul,31.1035) 'if she will not do it' |
(73) | a. | b. | c. |
The reason that we represent the verb as raising first to Neg and then I, rather than as skipping Neg and raising directly to I, is because Middle English allows questions like (74), where the negated verb inverts as a constituent with the subject.
(74) | Wil noht sho do it? |
In the incoming tense lowering grammar, structures containing not are ordinarily rescued by do support. But in contrast to sentences containing ordinary verbs, do support in a structure like (73) might plausibly have been ruled out on the grounds that modal do inherited a constraint from causative do that is given in (75).
(75) | The complement of a causative construction cannot be headed by an auxiliary element (a premodal, modal, or auxiliary verb like have or be). |
Notice that the constraint on causative verbs in (75) is not specific to Middle English; its effects in modern English and German are illustrated in (76) and (77).
(76) | a. | No auxiliary | The coach had the players run. | |
b. | Auxiliary | * | The coach had the players be running. | |
c. | * | The coach had the players have run. | ||
(77) | a. | No auxiliary | Der Trainer liess die Spieler laufen. the coach had the players run. 'The coach had the players run.' | |
b. | Auxiliary | * | Der Trainer liess die Spieler am Laufen sein. the coach had the players at.the running be 'The coach had the players be running.' | |
c. | * | Der Trainer liess die Spieler gelaufen sein. the coach had the players run.part be 'The coach had the players have (lit. be) run.' | ||
d. | * | Der Trainer liess die Spieler laufen wollen. the coach had the players run want 'The coach had the players want to run.' |
Again, various ways out of this impasse are conceivable. For instance, the constraint in (75) might have been relaxed for modal do. What actually happened, however, was that any remaining premodals were reanalyzed as modals along the lines of must and shall. The schematic structure for (73a) after the reanalysis is shown in (78). (Note that (78) still allows not to raise to I as a precondition for the subject-aux inversion in (74).)
(78) |
After this reanalysis, sentences like (79), with nonfinite forms of premodals like cunnen and mowen, both meaning 'be able to', ceased to be possible in English (at least in the standard language).
(79) | a. | he schuld cun best rede þe booke (cmkempe,4.52) 'He should be able to read the book best.' | |
b. | I shal not conne wel goo thyder (cmreynar,14.261) 'I won't be able to go there easily.' | ||
c. | and hij shul nouȝt mow stonde (cmearlps,19.765) 'and he shall not be able to stand' | ||
d. | Noo man shall mow resyst thy power in all thy lyfe.
(cmfitzja,A3R.28) 'No man shall be able to resist your power in all your life.' |
(80) | a. | Auxiliary verb | Perfect | I have read that chapter. |
b. | Progressive | I am reading that chapter. | ||
c. | Passive | That material is treated in the next chapter. | ||
(81) | a. | Main verb: | I have that book. | |
b. | This chapter is difficult. |
We begin by considering these verbs as auxiliaries in structures like (82) (we assume for simplicity that the elementary trees for auxiliary verbs don't have specifiers, but the assumption isn't crucial in what follows).
(82) |
As just discussed in connection with modals, tense lowering is impossible in a structure like (82) because not intervenes between tense and the verb, nor can the structure be rescued by do support given the constraint suggested in (75). This is exactly the situation in which the premodals were reanalyzed as instances of I. In the case of the premodals, this reanalysis was possible because they rarely occurred as nonfinite forms. But an analogous reanalysis in the case of auxiliary verbs was precluded because nonfinite auxiliary have and be were productive in Middle English (as they continue to be in Modern English). Some examples are given in (83) and (84); again, the auxiliary verbs are in boldface and the main verbs are underlined. In addition, the element in I (modal or premodal), which guarantees the nonfiniteness of the auxiliary verb, is in italics.
(83) | a. | y shulde haue axede of here no more (cmbrut3,19.562) 'I should have asked no more of her' | |
b. | and after he wolde haue conquerede al Scotland and Walys
(cmbrut3,23.686) 'and afterwards he would have conquered all Scotland and Wales' | ||
c. | And Gutlagh wolde haue went into his countree
(cmbrut3,25.728) 'And Gutlagh would have gone into his country' | ||
(84) | a. | Bot euensang sal be saide wid foure salmes
(cmbenrul,18.626) 'But evensong shall be said with four psalms' | |
b. | the wordes of the phisiciens sholde been understonden
in this wise (cmctmeli,226.C2.365) 'the words of the physicians should be understood in this way' | ||
c. | A sone, Josias bi name, schal be born to the hous of Dauith
(cmpurvey,I,13.518) 'A son, Josias by name, shall be born to the house of David' |
As in the earlier case of the development of the premodals to modals, various ways of resolving this impasse are conceivable. AgAin, for instance, the constraint preventing do from occurring with auxiliary elements might have been relaxed. However, what actually happened in the history of English is that children acquired the verb raising option with precisely these two lexical items. As a result, the order of auxiliary have and be with respect to negation in modern English parallels that in French.
English | French | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
(85) | a. | Verb raising | We have not read the book. | Nous (n') avons pas lu le livre. we NE have not read the book | ||
b. | We are not invited. | Nous (ne) sommes pas invités. we NE are not invited | ||||
(86) | a. | No verb raising | * | We (do) not have read the book. | * | Nous (ne) pas avons lu le livre. |
b. | * | We (do) not be invited. | * | Nous (ne) pas sommes invités. |
(87) schematically illustrates the derivation of the English examples. (87a) is identical to (82), and as in the analogous structure for modals in (71), we take the verb to raise to I via Neg because the entire complex head can invert with the subject in questions.
(87) | a. | b. | c. |
Let us now turn to the main verb uses of have and be. For a time, main verb have behaved syntactically like auxiliary have, raising from V to I and otherwise exhibiting the syntactic behavior of a modal, as illustrated in (88).
(88) | a. | Negation without do support | He hasn't any money; you haven't any wool. | |
b. | Question formation without do support | Has he any money; have you any wool? |
However, in present-day American English, the pattern in (88) is archaic and has been replaced by the pattern in (89), where main verb have exhibits the syntax of an ordinary verb.
(89) | a. | Negation with do support | He doesn't have any money; you don't have any wool. | |
b. | Question formation with do support | Does he have any money; do you have any wool? |
The replacement of (88) by (89) in American English took place from about 1800 to 1950 (Zimmermann 2017). British English usage, which was more conservative during this time, is now to some extent falling in line with American English.15
Finally, we consider main verb be, which exhibits richer agreement than any other verb in English. Strikingly, it is also the only main verb in English that continues to raise to I.
(90) | a. | No do support | This chapter isn't difficult. | |
b. | Is this chapter difficult? | |||
(91) | a. | Do support | * | This chapter doesn't be difficult. |
b. | * | Does this chapter be difficult? |
Resume reading here. |
1.
In what follows, we focus on the past tense since the present tense
is not overtly marked at all in English. The -s of the third
person singular expresses subject agreement rather than present
tense (Kayne 1989).
2.
Yiddish and the southern German dialects from which it developed are
exceptions in this regard. In these languages, the synthetic
simple past has been completely replaced by the
analytic present perfect (Middle High German ich machte 'I
made' > Yiddish ikh hob gemakht, literally 'I have made').
3. A comparable shift
occurred in English from 'they have to V' to 'they must V'. Such
semantic shifts, with concomitant changes in morphological status
(see 4. Such reanalysis might be
the source of much, if not all, inflectional morphology. In many
cases, especially in languages that are not written, the sources of
the inflections would be obscured by further linguistic changes,
primarily phonological reduction. Consider, for instance, the
development of the future tense in Tok Pisin, an English-based contact language that
originated in the 1800s and that has become the national language of
Papua New Guinea. In current Tok Pisin, particularly among speakers
who learn it as a first language, the future marker is the bound
morpheme b-. We are fortunate to have written records of Tok
Pisin from the late 1800s, and so we happen to know that this
morpheme is the reflex of the adverbial phrase by and by,
which the earliest speakers of Tok Pisin frequently used to indicate
future tense. Without these records, a derivation of b- from
by and by would be speculation at best.
5. Historically, the negative
marker in French was ne, and pas, literally 'step',
was an intensifier without negative force of its own. Modern
English has comparable intensifiers, as in I don't want to do it
{ one bit, at all. } In the course of the history
of French, ne, being phonologically weak, was often elided in
speech, and pas was reanalyzed as carrying negative force.
In modern French, ne is characteristic of the formal
language, and in some spoken varieties, such as Montreal
French, ne hardly ever occurs. In the present discussion, we
disregard ne, treating it as an optional, semantically
meaningless particle and glossing it as NE.
6.
Do support and the syntax of negation raises some of the
thorniest problems in English syntax, and no completely satisfactory
analysis of it exists as yet. So although our analysis is adequate
to explain the contrast between (32) and (33), it is by no means
intended to solve many other puzzles that have been discovered in
connection with these phenomena.
7.
The discussion in this section is based on data and ideas in
Barnes 1992,
Falk 1993,
Heycock et al. 2010,
2011,
Holmberg and Platzack 1995,
Platzack 1988,
Roberts 1993,
and
Vikner 1995.
8.
In what follows, we do not consider verb-final languages like German
or Dutch. Evidence for verb raising in these languages would have
to come from adverbs that right-adjoin to V', with the finite verb then
moving rightward across the adverb. However, for reasons that are not
yet understood, right-adjunction to V' does not seem to possible in
verb-final languages.
9.
For some reason, negation cannot participate in negative inversion in
Danish, perhaps because it cannot bear prosodic stress.
10. The discussion in this
section is based on data and ideas in Frisch
1997, Kroch 1989, Roberts
1993, and Rohrbacher 1993.
11. Early Middle English had
a negative particle ne, etymologically cognate with French
ne and syntactically comparable to it. See 12. The possibility of
adjoining adverbs to I' complicates the assignment of structures to
sentences with adverb-verb word order once verb raising begins to be
lost. This is because they could be instances of the old verb
raising grammar, with the adverb adjoined at I', or instances of the
new grammar without verb raising, with the adverb adjoined at either
I' or V'. In any particular sentence, it isn't possible to tell
which is the right structure. But in a corpus of sentences, it is
possible to correct for the complication introduced by the
possibility of adjunction to I', because the frequency of adjunction
to I' has remained stable from Early Middle English until today
(about 15% with never). This means that frequencies of
adverb-verb order in a corpus that appreciably exceed 15% can
reliably be attributed to the tense lowering grammar.
13.
Not continued to be available as an adverb with a low
frequency into the 1600s. The evidence for this is the existence,
though rare, of negative sentences in Early Modern English of the
modern mainland Scandinavian type, with not preceding a
finite verb, as in the examples from Shakespeare in (i).
(i) | a. | they deafe mens' eares, but not edify. | |
b. | he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him. | ||
c. | Safe on this ground we not fear today to tempt your laughter by our rustic play. |
These sentences are linguistic hybrids in the sense that they
contain the adverbial not characteristic of early Middle
English, yet have lost verb raising, just like modern English. As
adverbial not finally dies out completely in the 1600s, so do
sentences of the type in (i).
14. The agentless construction
discussed in the text was also attested with verbs of perception, as
illustrated in (i).
(i) | a. | They heard say that the English had won the battle of Agincourt.
'They heard someone say that ..., they heard it said that ...' | |
b. | They heard tell of the wages of sin.
'They heard someone tell ...' |
A fossilized form of the construction is the nominalization hearsay.
15.
The replacement of (88) by (89) is complicated by the existence in both
American and British English of the have got pattern illustrated
in (i), where have serves as an auxiliary verb rather than as
the main verb. Sutherland 2000 studies the
competition among all three variants (have with and without
do support and have got) in both dialects of English.
(i) | a. | He hasn't got any money; you haven't got any wool. | |
b. | Has he got any money; have you got any wool? |
A note on spelling: u and v were used interchangeably
in Middle English.
The data raise certain issues beyond the ones concerning verb raising. For instance, is never before a constituent? Is such a determiner or an adjective? What about numerals? Solve the issues as best you can, and briefly describe the issues and justify your solutions. Assume that you can bring evidence from Modern English (or other languages, for that matter) to bear on the structures you are building for the Middle English sentences. |
(1) | a. | Engist knew neuer before þat lande
'Engist never before knew that land.' | |
b. | she saide she had neuer company of man worldely
'She said that she never had the company of any worldly man.' | ||
c. | Seynt Edmond vsyd euer after that prayer to his lyvys ende
'Saint Edmund afterwards always used that prayer till the end of his life (lit. to his life's end)' | ||
d. | sche had euyr mech tribulacyon tyl sche cam to Iherusalem
'She always had much tribulation till she came to Jerusalem.' | ||
e. | I knewe never such two knyghtes
'I never knew two such knights.' | ||
f. | thes two gyauntes dredde never knyght but you
'These two giants never feared any knight but you.' |
(1) | a. | I will suggest that he { come, *comes, *came. } | |
b. | I suggested that he { come, *comes, *came. } |
The structure for the grammatical variant in (1a) is given in (2).
(2) |
Is the silent subjunctive element that heads these complement
clauses a bound or a free morpheme? Explain.
A. Build a structure for (1). (Don't build structures for the
material in parentheses.)
Exercise 6.3
(1) | She didn't only write the letter (but she sent it). |
B. Now build a structure for (2), making sure that it is consistent with the locality constraint on head movement from the chapter.
(2) | She not only wrote the letter (but she sent it). |
C. There turn out to be two structures for (2). They are topologically
distinct, but there is no semantic difference between them. What's the
difference between the structure that you came up in (B) and the second
structure?
African American English (AAE) distinguishes two types of
be: habitual be vs. ordinary be. Both can be used
as main verbs or auxiliaries. We pose the exercise after describing the
semantic and morphological differences between the two types
of be. The data are based
on Green 1998.
Habitual be has no counterpart in standard English. It is used
to describe situations that are generally true, as illustrated in (1).
Exercise 6.4
(1) | a. | Main verb | The coffee be nasty at that joint. 'The coffee is always/usually bad at that place.' | |
b. | Auxiliary | The baby be sleeping when they call. 'The baby is always/usually sleeping/asleep when they call.' |
Ordinary be resembles standard English be.
Unlike standard English be, ordinary be can be silent in the present tense in AAE, as indicated by the parentheses in (2). In this respect, AAE resembles languages like Hebrew and Russian. Habitual be cannot be silent. We mention these facts for completeness. For the purposes of the exercise, disregard the silent option. |
(2) | a. | Main verb | This coffee (is) nasty. 'This coffee is bad.' (as a one-time occurrence) | |
b. | Auxiliary | The baby (is) sleeping. 'The baby is sleeping.' (now) |
The two types of be also differ morphologically, as shown in (3).
(3) | Habitual be | Ordinary be | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
I | be | am | |||||||
you | '' | is | |||||||
he/she/it | '' | '' | |||||||
we | '' | '' | |||||||
y'all | '' | '' | |||||||
they | '' | '' | |||||||
The complete lack of person agreement for habitual be is
consistent with the fact that AAE has generally lost person agreement in
the present. In other words, AAE has
Given the above facts, what do you expect as the emphatic, negated,
and interrogative versions of the habitual be sentence in (1)?
Exercise 6.5
A. Explain the grammaticality contrast in (2), assuming the judgments
as given. If necessary, invent a new syntactic category for so
to belong to.
(1) | A (challenging B): | You're lying; you didn't go to the movies. | ||
(2) | a. | B (responding to the challenge): | I did so go to the movies. | |
b. | B (responding to the challenge): | * | I so went to the movies. |
B. Some speakers accept (2b) as a response to (1). How does the
grammar of such speakers differ from the grammar of speakers with the
contrast in (2)?
Given the discussion in Chapter 6 and the notes below, exactly one
of the Korean sentences in (1) is ungrammatical because it violates a
principle of Universal Grammar. Which sentence is it, and why is it
ungrammatical? If you wish, you can use the grammar tool in
korean
negation to build structures for the sentences in (1).
Exercise 6.6
Assume that hayessta is a morphologically simple head of
category I (despite apparently containing the same bound morpheme
-essta as mek-essta). This is exactly parallel to
the way that we treat tense on auxiliary do in English.
Korean allows only left adjunction. The nom(inative) and acc(usative) case morphemes explicitly indicating the grammatical functions subject and object, respectively, are included for completeness. They are not important for the purposes of the exercise. The data for this exercise are somewhat simplified in that they do not reflect a syntactic process called scrambling. As a result, native speakers of Korean will find more than one sentence in (1) unacceptable. |
(1) | a. | Chulswu-ka pap -ul mek-essta. Chulswu nom meal acc eat past 'Chulswu ate the meal.' | |
b. | Chulswu-ka pap -ul mekci ani hayessta. Chulswu nom meal acc eat neg did 'Chulswu did not eat the meal.' | ||
c. | Chulswu-ka pap -ul mek-essta ani. Chulswu nom meal acc eat past neg 'Chulswu did not eat the meal.' | ||
d. | Chulswu-ka an pap-ul mek-essta. Chulswu nom neg meal acc eat past 'Chulswu did not eat the meal.' |
(1) | a. | Dems' fightin' words | |
b. | Dem's fightin' words. |
(1) | a. | He is never late. | |
b. | He isn't late. | ||
(2) | a. | She never regrets her extravagances. | |
b. | She doesn't regret her extravagances. |
Based on data for the verb be, given in (3)-(5), there is evidence of three later stages of the language (not necessarily presented in chronological order).
(3) | a. | He never bees late. | |
b. | He doesn't be late. | ||
(4) | a. | He bees never late. | |
b. | He bees not late. | ||
(5) | a. | He never bees late. | |
b. | He not bees late. |
A. What are the properties of the grammmars that generate the sentence types in (3)-(5)?
B. Is it possible to arrange the grammars in chonological order based on internal linguistic evidence (that is, not using a radiocarbon dating machine or whatever archeologists are using in the 31st century)? Explain briefly.
C. For the same time period as (3)-(5), the sentence types attested with ordinary verbs are as in (2) and (6).
(6) | She not regrets her extravagances. |
(1) | He said he would finish the project, ... | ||
a. | and finish the project he did. | ||
b. | * | and finished the project he. |
(1) | a. | S V O | b. | S O V | |||
c. | V S O | d. | V O S | ||||
e. | O V S | f. | O S V |
Given what you know about phrase structure and verb raising, which of the orders would you expect to find among the world's languages, and which ones would you expect not to find?
B. It has been observed (though not yet satisfactorily explained)
that head-initial Infl can take VP complements that are either
head-initial or head-final, but that head-final Infl is required to take
VP complements that are head-final themselves. What effect does this
observation have on your answer to (A)?
Old English was notorious for its word order freedom, allowing word
order variants beyond those that were the topic
of Exercise 5.10, notably the ones in (1).
Problem 6.4
(1) | a. | Beowulf Grendel will slay. | |
b. | The hero the monster will slay. | ||
c. | The hero of the poem the monster's mother will slay. |
How might head movement be relevant for the representation of these word orders?