CRISSP is happy to announce another installment in the CRISSP Seminar series:
Lecturer: Jan-Wouter Zwart (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
Title: Periphrastic morphology, verb clusters, and verb movement
Date & time: Friday 27 May 2016, 10h00
Location: CRISSP/KULeuven Brussels Campus, room 4218
Participation: free
Abstract
This paper proposes to take a fresh look at the syntactic derivation and morphological realization of Continental West Germanic verb clusters. Assuming a morphology-after-syntax approach, I argue that some clusters (involving temporal and voice auxiliaries) are morphologically periphrastic expressions realizing a single syntactic terminal (a lexeme with features). This simplifies the derivation of verb clusters in narrow syntax, and I will attempt a further simplification by arguing that other clusters (involving modal auxiliaries, raising verbs, ECM-predicates, and restructuring verbs) may be created in separate derivational layers, to be entered in the numeration as a single item. The interesting question then is what to predict for the nature of clusters involving auxiliaries/verbs of both types. A further consequence is that verb movement of auxiliaries (especially temporal/voice auxiliaries) must be postsyntactic, and hence that all verb movement must be viewed as postsyntactic, lest we miss a major generalization.