Verb movement: The contrast between English and Polish
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Madoka Murakami
Abstract
This paper discusses V features, nominative case checking, and V movement in Chomsky’s (1995, 2001) minimalist program, explains the facets of the English subjunctive and imperative, and contrasts the difference of V movement between English and Polish. I propose the V feature specifications [−Tense, +Agr] and [+Tense, −Agr] for the English subjunctive and imperative respectively. Under this analysis, the auxiliary do can be solely inserted into [+Tense], which is an independent case checker, while [+Agr] is a dependent case checker which must be activated by another head under adjacent head-to-head relation (Raposo 1987).
It is further illustrated that the finite V carries [+Tense, +Agr] in English, but [+Tense, +Agr, +Mood] for earlier English and other European languages such as Polish. The claim is that the diachronic change of V movement should not be attributed to any impoverishment of agreement morphology, but to the demise of mood morphology, and that V raising can be accounted for in terms of the strength of I by counting the number of positive features: The more, the stronger. The peculiar behavior of by plus an agreement suffix in Polish subjunctives can also be explained by setting up MoodP which hosts [+Agr, +Mood] in its head.
© School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, 2011
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Intonation training integrated with language learning strategies (LLS) to Vietnamese learners of English
- Left/right and front/back in sign, speech, and co-speech gestures: What do data from Turkish Sign Language, Croatian Sign Language, American Sign Language, Turkish, Croatian, and English reveal?
- Modelling gesture as speech: A linguistic approach
- Antonymous frameworks in Serbian written discourse: Phrasal contexts of antonym co-occurrence in text
- On the influence of subordinators on extractions from complement clauses
- Verb movement: The contrast between English and Polish
- Sound symbolism in vowels: Vowel quality, duration and pitch in sound-to-size correspondence
- The retrieval of data on the basis of part-of-speech labelling
- Review of Brandão de Carvalho, Joaquim, Tobias Scheer and Philippe Ségéral (eds.). 2008. Lenition and fortition.
