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CP-recursion in Danish: A cP/CP-analysis

  • Anne Mette Nyvad , Ken Ramshøj Christensen EMAIL logo and Sten Vikner
Published/Copyright: June 14, 2017
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Abstract

Based on data from extraction, embedded V2, and complementizer stacking, this paper proposes a cP/CP-analysis of CP-recursion in Danish. Because extraction can be shown to be possible from relative clauses, wh-islands, and adverbial clauses, and given that long extraction is successive-cyclic, an extra specifier position has to be available as an escape hatch. Consequently, such extractions require a CP-recursion analysis, as has been argued for embedded V2 and for complementizer stacking. Given that CP-recursion in embedded V2 clauses does not allow extraction, whereas other types of CP-recursion do, we suggest that embedded V2 is fundamentally different, in that main clause V2 and embedded V2 involve a CP (“big CP”), whereas all other clausal projections above IP are instances of cP (“little cP”). The topmost “little” c° has an occurrence feature that enables extraction but bars spell-out of its specifier.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Theresa Biberauer, Elisabet Engdahl, Constantin Freitag, Hans-Martin Gärtner, Fredrik Heinat, Johannes Kizach, Filippa Lindahl, Doug Saddy, Anna-Lena Wiklund, Johanna Wood, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions as well as to participants in the Grammar in Focus workshop series at the University of Lund, February 2012 and 2016, participants in Grammatikseminar, University of Lund, January 2013, participants in the SyntaxLab talk series at the University of Cambridge, May 2016, and participants in the DGfS conference in Konstanz, February 2016. The work presented here was partly supported by Forskningsrådet for Kultur og Kommunikation (Danish Research Council for Culture and Communication).

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Published Online: 2017-6-14
Published in Print: 2017-8-28

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