When Particles Won't Part - CUNY Graduate Center

Marcel den Dikken — When Particles Won’t Part
(vi) a. leer om die taal te praat
learn COMP that language to speak
b. leer om te die taal te praat
learn COMP to that language to speak
Interesting though they certainly are, these Groningen and Orange River Afrikaans data do not have anything
to say, however, about the status of te in varieties of Dutch and Afrikaans in which splitting of the type
illustrated in (iv) and (vb)/(vib) is ungrammatical. For those varieties, as well as for German, I will follow
Haider (2002) (contra e.g. Wilder 1988, Evers 1990, Zwart 1993, IJbema 2002) in analysing the infinitival
marker as a verbal prefix.
32. Koopman (1995:144, fn. 12) notes correctly that, when it comes to to-infinitives, ‘the judgments are
not crystal clear’ . She gives the examples in (i) as an illustration.
(i) a. (?) omdat ze dit programma volgend jaar schijnen heruit te zenden
because they this program next year seem re-out to send
b. *omdat ze dit programma volgend jaar heruit schijnen te zenden
because they this program next year re-out seem to send
‘because they seem to rebroadcast this program next year’
I agree with Koopman that (ib) is impossible (though perhaps not meriting a full star); I find (ia) somewhat
less good than she does, though — as reflected in the table in (81) and in the judgement I gave for (82b), I
find her-Prt te V generally rather awkward (whence the ‘?’ ); but clearly, te her-Prt-V is much worse.
33. The facts from German N–V ‘pseudo-compounds’ , as catalogued in Holmberg’ s (1976) statistical
study, confirm this picture overall. In German, as in Dutch, splitting the infinitive is not correlated with
stranding under V2 — though for verbs like brustschwimmen ‘breast-swim’ and haushalten ‘housekeep’
types, there does seem to be a correlation between a preference for N–zu–Vinf and a preference for splitting
in V2 constructions, there is no overall correlation between the two: for verbs like bauchlanden ‘belly-land’ ,
notlanden ‘emergency-land’ and bauchreden ‘belly-speak, ventriloquise’ , the N–zu–Vinf order is accepted
at a substantially higher rate than the zu–N–Vinf order, but stranding the N under V2 is virtually categorically
rejected. All of the above examples of N–V compounds, according to Holmberg (1976:28), evince ‘increasing
unclarity’ (‘zunehmende Unklarheit’ ; p. 28) when it comes to the placement of the formatives zu and pastparticipial
ge-, and they show a very high overall rejection rate, generally over 50%. It is not advisable,
therefore, to take these as one’ s model. On the other hand, N–V compounds with a strong preference for
the zu–N–Vinf order like nachtwandeln ‘night-walk’ both show a much higher overall acceptance rate than
N–V compounds of the other types identified by Holmberg, and reveal a significant correlation between that
preference for zu–N–Vinf order and a preference for V2-as-a-unit. The bottom line, therefore, seems to be
that in German, as in Dutch, zu–N–Vinf is correlated with V2-as-a-unit (while no obvious correlation between
N–zu–Vinf and behaviour under V2 manifests itself).
34. Think of this as a ‘once removed’ restriction: the checker of the EPP–feature can be one of the
immediate subconstituents of the raised category but it cannot be more deeply embedded; this is in the spirit
of Chomsky (1993).
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