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Conditional clauses, Main Clause Phenomena and the syntax of polarity emphasis

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Abstract

This paper addresses two properties of conditional clauses: (i) their incompatibility with Main Clause Phenomena (MCP), exemplified by English argument fronting, and (ii) the unavailability of Speaker Oriented Adverbs (Ernst 2009) (SpOAs). The paper elaborates the hypothesis (Bhatt & Pancheva 2002, 2006) that conditionals are derived by operator movement: the absence of MCP then follows from locality conditions. Adopting the cartographic approach to SpOAs (Cinque 1999), we propose that the operator which derives conditionals originates in SpecMoodirrealis. This implementation of the movement derivation accounts for the unavailability of SpOAs. The final part of the paper extends the range of MCP: it shows that polarity emphasis is not a homogeneous phenomenon: certain expressions of emphatic polarity are MCP and hence unavailable in conditionals, while others are not restricted to root domains.

Abstract

This paper addresses two properties of conditional clauses: (i) their incompatibility with Main Clause Phenomena (MCP), exemplified by English argument fronting, and (ii) the unavailability of Speaker Oriented Adverbs (Ernst 2009) (SpOAs). The paper elaborates the hypothesis (Bhatt & Pancheva 2002, 2006) that conditionals are derived by operator movement: the absence of MCP then follows from locality conditions. Adopting the cartographic approach to SpOAs (Cinque 1999), we propose that the operator which derives conditionals originates in SpecMoodirrealis. This implementation of the movement derivation accounts for the unavailability of SpOAs. The final part of the paper extends the range of MCP: it shows that polarity emphasis is not a homogeneous phenomenon: certain expressions of emphatic polarity are MCP and hence unavailable in conditionals, while others are not restricted to root domains.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. List of contributors vii
  4. Comparative Germanic Syntax ix
  5. Modal complement ellipsis 1
  6. On the adverbial reading of infrequency adjectives and the structure of the DP 35
  7. Crossing the lake 67
  8. Preposition-determiner amalgams in German and French at the syntax-morphology interface 99
  9. Conditional clauses, Main Clause Phenomena and the syntax of polarity emphasis 133
  10. Cross-Germanic variation in binding Condition B 169
  11. Development of sentential negation in the history of German 199
  12. Contact, animacy, and affectedness in Germanic 223
  13. Syntactic change in progress 249
  14. Cross Germanic variation in the realm of support verbs 279
  15. The shift to strict VO in English at the PF-interface 311
  16. Deriving reconstruction asymmetries in Across The Board by means of asymmetric extraction + ellipsis 353
  17. A morphologically guided matching approach to German(ic) relative constructions 387
  18. Index 415
Comparative Germanic Syntax
This chapter is in the book Comparative Germanic Syntax
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.191.05dan

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. List of contributors vii
  4. Comparative Germanic Syntax ix
  5. Modal complement ellipsis 1
  6. On the adverbial reading of infrequency adjectives and the structure of the DP 35
  7. Crossing the lake 67
  8. Preposition-determiner amalgams in German and French at the syntax-morphology interface 99
  9. Conditional clauses, Main Clause Phenomena and the syntax of polarity emphasis 133
  10. Cross-Germanic variation in binding Condition B 169
  11. Development of sentential negation in the history of German 199
  12. Contact, animacy, and affectedness in Germanic 223
  13. Syntactic change in progress 249
  14. Cross Germanic variation in the realm of support verbs 279
  15. The shift to strict VO in English at the PF-interface 311
  16. Deriving reconstruction asymmetries in Across The Board by means of asymmetric extraction + ellipsis 353
  17. A morphologically guided matching approach to German(ic) relative constructions 387
  18. Index 415
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