Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

Section H: Syntax 87
The myth of verb cluster languages
Gaeta, Livio
Università di Napoli –Federico II
livio.gaeta@unina.it
Recently, there have been several proposals of grouping a certain number of languages by
means of properties displayed by verb clusters such as those reported below and exemplified
by German (cf. É. Kiss & H. van Riemsdijk, 2004, Verb Clusters, Amsterdam etc.,
Benjamins, for a survey):
(1) a. Thomas meint, dass die Studenten Deutsch werden lernen müssen.
b. Thomas meint, dass die Studenten Deutsch lernen müssen werden .
‘Thomas thinks that the students will have to learn German’
c. Thomas ist froh, dass die Studenten Deutsch haben lernen müssen.
d. *Thomas ist froh, dass die Studenten Deutsch lernen gemusst haben.
‘Thomas is glad that the students had to learn German’
So-called verb cluster languages are claimed to be characterized by not displaying a rigid word
order pattern in multiple verb constructions, as exemplified by the auxiliary werden ‘will’, which
may either open or close the verbal complex in (1a-b). Notice that in (1c-d) the phenomenon of
substitutive infinitive (infinitivus pro participio = IPP) shows up, in which an unexpected
infinitive form surfaces instead of the morphosyntactically “justified” past participle gemusst,
which is also attested in the paradigm. In despite of the big amount of accounts worked out to
derive the verb cluster properties from the perspective of universal grammar, “what still appears to
be an open question is the question of why the elements of a verb cluster are inverted in certain
languages and constructions. An answer to the question of what the (deep) motivation of verb
cluster formation is and why this phenomenon only exists in certain languages is still outstanding”
(S. Wurmbrand in press in The Syntax Companion, Oxford, Blackwell). The aim of this paper is
to reconsider the whole problem addressing this precise question: why is it so that basically West-
Germanic languages share to a certain extent the same patterns for verbal periphrases? The
answer must be sought in the grammaticalization process of the verbal periphrases, which took
place in the late Middle Age and accompanied the general reorganization of word order in the
sentence. In particular, the mismatch given by the IPP is a consequence of the semantically
grounded ban against employing the past participle of verbs governing an infinitive, for instance
in the attributive function as again exemplified by German: *der im Park laufen gesehene Mann
‘lit. the man seen run in the park, i.e. the man who was seen running in the park’ vs. der im Park
gesehene Mann ‘the man seen in the park’. This is due to semantic reasons, because the past
participle needs a second argument-time window to be anchored at. For light verbs the latter is
however saturated by the governed infinitive, which explains the asymmetry mentioned above.
When the perfect got grammaticalized, the potential domain given by verbs governing an
infinitive could only be exploited on condition that the restriction against the past participle was
saved. Therefore, the arguably default form, i.e. the infinitive, came in as a viable solution, giving
rise to the synchronic mismatch. The word order reorganization is to be seen as connected with
the developments of the periphrases, as confirmed by the future periphrasis which also shows a
default infinitive and is affected by the same scrambling process: as exptected, it was
grammaticalized during the same time span of the perfect. There is no need for assuming a
universal language group: this set of properties goes back to the particular evolution of a closely
related language family. The lesson to be learned from this tricky case is as old as modern
linguistic theory: languages are the result of historical processes, and accordingly language
change (and grammaticalization) can shed light on many mismatch effects observed in synchronic
grammars. Before moving to a universal explanatory level, the language-specific properties at
stake must be carefully scrutinized both from a synchronic and a diachronic point of view.