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Two Heads Aren’t Always Better Than One
Author(s) -
Bobaljik Jonathan David,
Thráinsson Höskuldur
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
syntax
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.587
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-9612
pISSN - 1368-0005
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9612.00003
Subject(s) - transitive relation , raising (metalworking) , verb , locality , head (geology) , linguistics , object (grammar) , mathematics , phrase , subject (documents) , computer science , parametric statistics , point (geometry) , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , combinatorics , geometry , philosophy , statistics , geomorphology , library science , geology
We propose a novel theory of verb raising in which different surface positions of the finite verb across languages reflect differences in phrase structure in a principled manner. Assuming that the inventory of functional projections dominating VP is not universal (e.g., the presence of Agr‐Phrases is a point of parametric variation) current assumptions about locality predict obligatory verb raising in a language with Agr‐Phrases, but obligatory V in situ in a simple IP‐VP configuration. We predict a correlation with other morpho‐syntactic phenomena reflecting the presence/absence of AgrPs: “extra” subject and object positions, transitive expletive constructions, multiple infelectional affixes, etc. This prediction is borne out for the VO Germanic languages; for the OV languages we predict the existence of head‐final Infl projections.