V(P)-fronting in Asante Twi and Limbum

When a verb or verb phrase is fronted from a clause lacking any other verbs either a copy of the displaced verb occurs or a dummy verb ‘do’ is inserted. Most languages employ the same strategy for both verb and verb phrase fronting. Here, I present two African languages, Asante Twi and Limbum, where displacement of a single verb results in a verb copy while a full verb phrase triggers do-support when fronted. Both V and VP-fronting show the same syntactic properties within each language. A reverse pattern of verb doubling with VP-fronting but do-support with V-fronting is unattested. I propose an analysis of both strategies in terms of different orders of application between post-syntactic head movement and copy deletion. In interaction with the type of V-movement, remnant VP or head-to-spec movement, this derives all three attested patterns to the exclusion of the unattested one.

Predicate fronting with verb doubling in Krachi: A parallel chains analysis

This article examines verb doubling predicate focus constructions in Krachi, an endangered language of Ghana. Krachi has three such constructions: one where V alone appears in the left periphery; another where VO has been fronted; and a third involving OV inversion in the fronted constituent. Regardless of the fronted expression, the constructions can be interpreted either contrastively or exhaustively. We argue that all three constructions involve the same mechanism – the formation of parallel chains anchored to the same syntactic object. We propose that the parallel chains formed in all three cases are identical, involving one v0-to-T0 head movement chain and one v’-to-Spec, FocP A-bar chain. The reduction of these chains at PF yields the surface doubling of the predicate without appeal to multiple copy spell-out. We propose that minor differences in the PF interpretation of the peripheral v’ copy account for the differences in word order between the three constructions.

The Linearity of Verb Copying Cleft Construction in Chinese: Semantic Underspecification and Pragmatic Enrichment

In Standard Chinese, verb doubling cleft construction (henceforth VDCC) has received little attention in the linguistic literature. Recently, Cheng and Vicente (2013) claim that VDCC has the same internal syntax as regular clefts, and two verbs stand in A-bar movement relation based on the lexical identity effect. In this paper, we argue that (1) VDCC is derived in line with the principle of linearity; (2) the first verb is a reduced minimal form acting as a topic which is pragmatically enriched via contextual information; (3) the second verb is interpretively dependent on the first verb.

Verb movement and the lack of verb-doubling VP-topicalization in Germanic

In the absence of a stranded auxiliary or modal, VP-topicalization in most Germanic languages gives rise to the presence of a dummy verb meaning ‘do’. Cross-linguistically, this is a rather uncommon strategy as comparable VP-fronting constructions in other languages, e.g. Hebrew, Polish, and Portuguese, among many others, exhibit verb doubling. A comparison of several recent approaches to verb doubling in VP-fronting reveals that it is the consequence of VP-evacuating head movement of the verb to some higher functional head, which saves the (low copy of the) verb from undergoing copy deletion as part of the low VP copy in the VP-topicalization dependency. Given that almost all Germanic languages have such V-salvaging head movement, namely V-to-C movement, but do not show verb doubling, this paper suggests that V-raising is exceptionally impossible in VP-topicalization clauses and addresses the question of why it is blocked. After discussing and rejecting some conceivable explanations for the lack of verb doubling, I propose that the blocking effect arises from a bleeding interaction between V-to-C movement and VP-to-SpecCP movement. As both operations are triggered by the same head, i.e. C, the VP is always encountered first by a downward search algorithm. Movement of VP then freezes it and its lower copies for subextraction precluding subsequent V-raising. Crucially, this implies that there is no V-to-T raising in most Germanic languages. V2 languages with V-to-T raising, e.g. Yiddish, are correctly predicted to not exhibit the blocking effect.

Predicate fronting in Yiddish and conditions on multiple copy Spell-Out

Predicate fronting with doubling (also known as the predicate cleft) has long been a challenge for theories of syntax that do not predict the pronunciation of multiple occurrences. Previous analyses that derive the construction via syntactic movement, including those attributing verb doubling to the formation of parallel chains (e.g., Aboh 2006; Kandybowicz 2008), are incompatible with remnant movement (Müller 1998), which does not give rise to doubling. This article presents data from the predicate fronting construction in Yiddish, in which verbs always double but complements never do. I argue that these seemingly contradictory pronunciation facts can be reconciled even if one assumes that phrasal movement and head movement are both syntactic. More specifically, the pronunciation of occurrences in Yiddish (doubled or not) follows from the general conditions on Spell-Out (or Transferpf) defined by Collins and Stabler (2016), modified only to accommodate syntactic head movement. Post-syntactic PF repairs are thus not required to account for the facts of the Yiddish predicate fronting construction. If such repairs are needed to generate doubling phenomena in other languages, they should be explicitly defined so as to modify or override the predictions of default Spell-Out conditions.

The V-one-V Construction and Modification of the Verbal Domain in Cantonese

This study deals with a syntactic analysis of the V-one-V construction that has implications on the structure of verbal modification in Cantonese. The V-one-V construction is unique in several ways, making it distinct from the cognate object construction in English or the verb-doubling construction in Cantonese. Several syntactic and semantic properties are discussed that support a syntactic analysis of V-one-V as an instance of syntactic verb copying (Corver and Nunes 2007) rather than a morphological treatment often prescribed to reduplication. The V-one-V construction consists of two copies of a verb with a number or quantifier jat1 ‘one’, loeng5 ‘two’, or gei2 ‘few’ between the copies. The construction denotes the delimitation of events, displaying interpretations of tentative, brief occurrences of events. This pattern indicates that V-one-V denotes delimitation in the senses of both counting and measuring and the choice depends on the nature of the VP, according to the data. This study also contributes to the discussion on postverbal modification as an alternative to V-one-V, which is more productive in its meaning and lexical choice.

Beyond Do-Support and Tun-Periphrasis: The Case of Finite Verb Doubling in Karrharde North Frisian

All West Germanic languages possess periphrastic verb constructions in which a finite dummy auxiliary ‘do’ combines with an infinitival thematic verb (compare do-support in English and tun-periphrasis in German). In Frisian, periphrastic verb constructions are not very common. It is all the more surprising, therefore, to find a general periphrastic verb construction in Karrharde North Frisian that seems to go beyond the typology of these constructions in West Germanic to some extent: The construction is rather unconstrained, it features a mysterious dummy auxiliary wer- and, most strikingly, both the dummy auxiliary and the thematic verb are finite. In this article, the basic data on finite verb doubling in Karrharde North Frisian is presented, and the origin of the dummy auxiliary wer- is tracked down. A synchronic analysis of the construction is proposed that relates it to the periphrastic verb constructions in other West Germanic languages. It is shown that finite verb doubling is in most respects a garden variety periphrastic verb construction, and that its special properties can be traced back to the fact that the dummy auxiliary developed from the complementizer wer ‘if, whether’ (possibly under language contact with Danish).