Chapter 9 - LOT publications

Accounts of SLI in Afrikaans
order to prevent the derivation from crashing (cf. Hornstein et al.
2005:295). By contrast, the tense feature of the head T of TP is assumed
to be semantically uninterpretable, which means that it has to be checked
and eliminated in the course of deriving the LF-representation of the
sentence (cf. Biberauer and Roberts 2005; Legate 2002:3). 143 Thus, if
there is no TP, the verb will not move, neither overtly nor covertly. This
does not imply, however, that the verb will necessarily occur in its
infinitival form in its base-generated position: In this position, the verb
can have any one of the tense forms that it has available in the lexicon.
In other words, without a TP in the structure, the verb will only occur in
its infinitival form if it has entered the Numeration in that form.
In short then, a verb may occur in its finite form irrespective of whether
the structure contains a TP with the appropriate head T. Evidence for
the absence of TP should thus not focus on the inappropriate
occurrence of infinitival forms, but rather on the absence of overt verb
movement in languages in which such movement does occur. If there is
no TP, then the finite verb, when it does occur, simply cannot move to
such a category. Moreover, the fact that in some languages, such as
Afrikaans, the finite and infinitival form of the verb are not
distinguishable 144 is also a reason for not focusing on the inappropriate
occurrence of infinitival forms as evidence for the absence of the TP (cf.
section 3.3.1.5).
The second reason for reconsidering Wexler’s (1994:335) proposal
concerns the fact that it does not clarify whether, and why, movement
takes place overtly or covertly: It is simply assumed that the verb moves
to the T if a TP is present in the derivation. Recall, however, that in
some languages, such as English, the verb does not move overtly out of
the VP before Spell-Out; it does move covertly, though, to check the T’s
143 If one views T as having the semantically interpretable feature, with V having the
uninterpretable one (which is possible in principle), then my argumentation against the
ATOM prediction regarding the form of unraised verbs does not hold. However, this is
generally not assumed, particularly not recently under the Probe-Goal system, where it
is crucial that the higher category has an unvalued feature if it is going to act as a probe.
144 The present tense and historic past tense forms of finite verbs are the same as the
infinitival form, e.g., stap ‘walk’ and om te stap ‘to walk’; the past tense form of finite
verbs are not, e.g., stap ‘walk’ and gestap ‘walk-PAST PART=walked’.
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