| description | Jan-Wouter Zwart. Submitted. Postsyntactic morphology and the syntax of verb clusters. For Benjamins volume. |
| type | Reviewed book chapter. |
| ID | 2022b | 173 | DOI | first version October, 2017; revised March 28, 2022 |
| origin | This paper was conceived for and presented at the Workshop on Tenselessness, Greenwich University, October 5-6, 2017. |
| keywords | tense, finiteness, verb clusters, layered derivations, restructuring, long passive |
| summary | It is argued that the properties of restructuring constructions in Dutch can be deduced straightforwardly on a dynamic approach to syntactic structure, where complex elements (including verb clusters) are generated in separate derivations feeding into the Numeration of the clause in which these complex elements appear. This ‘derivation layering’ is independently needed to describe the periphrastic past (finite or nonfinite) in a model of grammar in which morphology is the postsyntactic realization of the bundles of features created in Narrow Syntax. Temporal auxiliaries, on this approach, are not (in fact, cannot be) generated in functional heads, but are a by-product of morphological realization during postsyntactic externalization. In this model of grammar, restructuring is what we get when verbs are merged in a separate derivation layer. Nothing excludes this separate derivation to involve a tense operator associated with the embedded verb. The most natural assumption, then, would be to assume that this tense operator can always be present, and receives dependent or independent interpretation depending on the lexical semantics of the matrix predicate. |
| related |
full text;
131;
160;
Ter Beek 2008
Presentations: handout, 10/2017; Meertens, 05/2015; Stuttgart, 06/2007 |