Microvariation within Germanic to-Infinitives (original) (raw)
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Bare Infinitives in Alemannic and the Categorial Status of Infinitival Complements
Linguistic Variation Yearbook, 2007
This article deals mainly with the distribution and function of the infinitival marker in Standard German and in Alemannic, a dialect spoken in Southern Germany.* At first sight both form and distribution differ in these two variants to a great extent. The most important difference is that Alemannic generally lacks the infinitival markerzu(toin English,tein Dutch) in the environments where it occurs in SG. Instead, bare infinitives are used to a much greater extent than in SG.A detailed comparison shows how these Alemannic data can shed some new light on SG infinitival constructions — which are notoriously hard to analyze, especially the use ofzu. It will turn out thatzuplays hardly any syntactic role in restructuring contexts and is thus best accounted for in the word formation component rather than in the syntax. Another important issue to be discussed is extraposition. As will be shown below, extraposition is a much more widely used option in Alemannic than in SG — nevertheless, ...
The Left Periphery and Internal Structure of German zu-Infinitives
In diesem Aufsatz geht es um die linke Peripherie und die interne Struktur von zu-Infinitiven. In der Literatur wurde viel diskutiert, ob zu-Infinitive VPs oder CPs sind. Es wird aber gezeigt, dass die Eigenschaften von zu-Infinitiven, die bislang als CPs analysiert wurden, unterschiedlich sind, wenn man ihre Kombinatorik mit Modalpartikeln und Satzadverbialen betrachtet. In der vorliegenden Arbeit stelle ich zuerst die Analyse von Frey (2012) vor, in der die Eigenschaften von Adverbialsätzen mit Hilfe der ForceP erklärt werden. Danach zeige ich, dass es problematisch ist, Freys Analyse auf zu-Infinitive anzuwenden. Um eine einheitliche Analyse für Adverbialsätze und zu-Infinitive zu erreichen, gehe ich davon aus, dass es auch im Deutschen Operatorbewegung in der IP-Domäne (cf. Haegeman 2014) und Speech Act Phrase (cf. Miyagawa 2013) gibt. Mit dieser Annahme schlage ich Strukturen vor, die die Eigenschaften von zu-Infinitiven und das Verhalten von Madalpartikeln und Satzadverbialen darin einheitlich erklären können.
Revue roumaine de linguistique, 2023
Romanian and the Romance and Greek varieties of the extreme south of Italy show various degrees of diachronic and diatopic microvariation in the loss and retreat of the infinitive, whilst displaying at the same time a high degree of overall structural uniformity in their parallel preservation of the (bare) infinitive in: (1) restructuring contexts; (2) infinitival relatives; and (3) negative imperatives. On the surface, there is nothing a priori to suggest that these three contexts should be connected in any way. Yet the discussion below demonstrates how these three uses can be reduced to a single structural explanation which views the infinitive as a reduced clausal constituent (viz. v-VP) generated in a monoclausal structure selected in all cases by a modal, temporal or aspectual auxiliary which is phonologically overt in (1), but oscillates between overt and covert phonological realizations in (2) and (3) in accordance with crosslinguistic variation. The result is a unified analysis which allows us to capture the distribution of (bare) infinitival complementation in all the relevant varieties quite simply in terms of a so-called restructuring configuration in line with Hill’s (2013a,b, 2017) intuition that the Romanian (and more generally Balkan) bare infinitive instantiates a monoclausal structure selected by a T-related auxiliary.
Light Nouns and predicative Infinitives
In this paper, we will discuss an infinitival construction in German and (some of ) its dialects that has a semantically restricted distribution in that the infinitive can combine only with indefinite pronouns and under a certain class of (existential) verbs. Furthermore, the infinitival verb can be only an object-drop verb. The interesting thing about the dialects under discussion (Alemannic and Bavarian) is that in Ale- mannic the infinitive shows a special suffix ending in a dental stop and that in both dialects only a cliti- cized form of the infinitival marker zu is allowed (whereas in other contexts the complex form zum is used). We will argue for an analysis where the indefinite pronoun is taken as a light noun which functions as the subject of a small clause whose predicate consists of the infinitival form. The analysis will shed new light on the discussion of light nouns and the relative positioning of the adjective, see Kishimoto (2000), Larson/Marusic (2004). The adjectiv...
Linguistic variation and change: Middle English infinitive
Acta Neophilologica, 2004
In Middle English the old inflected infinitive lost its supine function and gradually replaced the uninflected infinitive in all positions, except in the complementation of moal and a limited number of other verbs. According to most linguists, the choice between the to infinitive and the bare infinitive was either lexically or structurally conditioned. The theory of linguistic change as the assertion of weaker or stronger linguistic variants postulates the affinity of stronger variants for more complex, i. e. functionally marked grammaticall environment. The author tests the validity of the theory against the assertion of the English to infinitive at the expanse of the bare infinitive after the Norman Conquest. The results confirm the initial hypothesist that the degree of formal marked ness of the infinitive concurred with the degree of the functional markedness of grammatical pa rameters.
The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 2000
The observational point of departure in this paper is that infinitivals (in Dutch and German) have no tense. Apparent counterexamples to this claim can be shown to involve aspect/Aktionsarten rather than tense. There is consequently no reason to posit any of the functional shell structure associated with tense. Hence, the infinitival markers (zu, te) may be assumed to be in (or close to) the VP. This is in accordance with the observation that these infinitival markers are always directly adjacent to the verb, which makes them similar to the verbal participial prefix ge-. A Minimalist account of zu/te, which is similar but not identical to ge-, is proposed. The question is then raised how zu (originally a true local-allative preposition) could have become a verbal prefix, and relevant diachronic data are adduced. Finally it is shown that a functionalist, or 'cognitivist', theory of grammaticalization like Haspelmath's misses the point in a number of ways. A more formalist theory of 'grammaticalizing reanalysis' is proposed as a better alternative.