When Particles Won't Part - CUNY Graduate Center

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Marcel den Dikken — When Particles Won’t Part This descriptive generalisation captures both West-Germanic and Scandinavian. For while in West-Germanic there is variation with respect to the placement of the infinitival marker vis-à-vis non-verbal material belonging to the verb, there is none in Scandinavian: throughout, the Scandinavian infinitival marker is outside (i.e., to the left of) material incorporated into the verb. The generalisation in (85) thus leads us to expect that material incorporated into the verb will always be carried along with the verb under Verb Second — and we had already discovered that this conclusion is borne out by the facts: recall the data in (46)–(48), repeated here: (46) stridighederne genopblussede med fornyet styrke (Danish) hostilities-the re-up-flared with renewed force (47) stridighetene gjenoppblusset med fornyet styrke (Norwegian) hostilities-the re-up-flared with renewed force (48) vi återuppbyggde skolan (Swedish) we re-up-built school-the The descriptive generalisation in (85) thus seems to offer the language user the key towards determining the behaviour of a complex verb under Verb Second. 5.4.3 Analysis How can the descriptive generalisation in (85) be reduced to independently established principles of the theory? Two things are essential when it comes to answering this question. The first is our earlier conclusion that the infinitival marker te/zu of Dutch and German is an inflectional affix, base-generated inside the complex verb (not the lexicalisation of a VP–external functional head). With that assumption in place, the placement of the infinitival marker vis-à-vis non-inflectional incorporated material gives the language user an explicit clue with respect to the location of the inflection inside the complex verb. Concretely, in cases in which the infinitival marker felicitously attaches outside the incorporated material, there is explicit evidence that inflection is peripheral in the complex verb: te, the inflectional element, is to the left of, hence peripheral to, the incorporated material. This clue offered by the te/zu-infinitive as to the location of inflection in the complex verb can then be exploited by the language user in determining whether movement of the entire complex verb to Verb Second position is legitimate or not. In particular, I submit that the proper way of rendering Koopman’ s (1995) basic insight that the presence of the particles in double particle constructions interferes with the attractability of the inflected verb to C in V2 is as in (86): (86) the presence of particles outside inflection prevents satisfaction of C’ s head–EPP property Verb Second is overt-syntactic raising of the finite verb to C, an operation which, on current theoretical assumptions, must be driven by an EPP property of C. I call it a ‘head–EPP’ property to indicate that it specifically brings about raising of a head to a C–adjoined position (as distinct from raising of a phrase to SpecCP, which is logically independent thereof, although in the Germanic V2 languages they tend to go together, V1 contexts aside). It is the satisfaction of this head–EPP property that goes awry in cases in which inflection is not peripheral in the complex verb — because: (87) the head–EPP property of (root) C must be satisfied by inflection 28
Marcel den Dikken — When Particles Won’t Part The inflection on double particle constructions of type (53.I/II) is not recognisable because inflection is not an immediate constituent of the complex head — its immediate constituents are (i) the particle-complex and (ii) the inflected verb, with the latter having inflection as its immediate constituent. If, then, the head–EPP property of (root) C must be satisfied by inflection (88), and if that requires inflection to be an immediate constituent of the element raised to C, 34 the ban on V2 with (53.I/II) follows. In (53.III/IV), on the other hand, no V2 problems arise for those forms of this type for which post-te placement of the particles is felicitous — inflection is outermost for those forms, hence an immediate subconstituent of the category raised to C. Notice that this account of the ban on V2-as-a-unit for double particle cases in which the inflection is not peripheral (as evidenced by the ban on placement of the infinitival marker to the left of the incorporated material) is couched entirely in terms of satisfaction of the EPP property of C. It makes no reference whatsoever to the checking of the inflectional features themselves. As a matter of fact, nothing interferes with the checking of those features. This is clear from the fact that there is no ban on finiteness for double particle verbs of types (53.I/II): they may perfectly well be finite, provided that they are not in a root CP. Thus, the presence of the particles per se does not interfere with the Agree relationship between T and the inflected verb. This is what is expected: the Agree relationship between T and the inflection on the double particle verb could only be interfered with by a phase boundary, but clearly the presence of two particles on the complex verb does not introduce such a phase boundary. Agree, and hence feature checking, thus succeed in all double particle constructions. What goes awry in a subset of double particle constructions — as well as noun-incorporation cases of the type illustrated in (84) — is that the head–EPP property of C fails to be satisfied when the inflection on the complex verb, which is what satisfies C’ s EPP property, is embedded inside the complex verb and not visible on the outside of it. For double particle verbs of type (53.IV), the herverdelen ‘redistribute’ type, there is explicit positive evidence from the placement of the infinitival marker te to the left of the particle complex (te herverdelen) that inflection is peripheral. Similarly, for type (53.IIIc), oververhitten ‘over-heat’ , the acceptability of ? te oververhitten tells the language user that inflection is peripheral, hence Verb Second of the entire complex verb is legitimate. For the other types of double particle verb, by contrast, positive evidence for the peripherality of inflection is lacking: placement of the infinitival marker to the left of the particles is systematically bad; ‘splitting’ is never particularly felicitous either. This prevents Verb Second altogether for cases in which the infinitival marker cannot be placed either outside or inside the complex verb. In the Scandinavian languages, the free-standing VP–external nature of the infinitival marker gives the learner no clue as to the relative order of attachment of inflectional morphology and incorporated particles: there is no positive evidence that inflection is peripheral inside the complex verb, but then again, there also is no indication that inflection is not peripheral. The facts are, quite simply, compatible with a hypothesis to the effect that inflection is attached outside the incorporated particles: nothing stands in the way of a hypothesis of this type for the Scandinavian languages. As a result, nothing prevents the movement of the complex verb to V2, as desired. Let me comment briefly here on the way the language learner might go about learning this apparently baroquely complicated system. On the positive side of things, there is a clear and directly helpful cue coming from unsplit infinitives: whenever the sequence te X(–Y)–Vinf is grammatical (where ‘X’ and ‘Y’ are incorporated elements, including but not restricted to particles; cf. the nouns in (84)), we can be sure that Verb Second of the X(–Y)–V complex is grammatical as well. On the other side of the coin, however, we find a more complicated picture. It is plainly not the case that, whenever X(–Y) te Vinf is acceptable, Verb Second with stranding of X(–Y) succeeds equally felicitously (that is, ?(?) heraf te drukken is substantially better than ?? ze drukken het artikel heraf ‘they print the article re-off’ , which is quite awkward; similarly for ?? voor aan te melden and ? *ze melden hun dochter voor aan ‘they pre-register their daughter’ ). 29
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When Particles Won't Part - CUNY Graduate Center

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