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.

VP-fronting within a movement typology

Van Urk (2015) proposes that the A/A’ distinction doesn’t follow from the landing site of the movement (e.g. Spec, CP vs. Spec, TP), but from the details of the features found in the probes. In this paper, we extend this characterization of movement typology to ‘spinal movement’ (movement of projections along the spine of the syntactic structure), in this case VP movement, proposing that there are A and A’ equivalents to VP movement. We then extend the typology to include a third type of movement, which we label C(ategorial)-movement as it is sensitive to the shared category feature of the extended projection. As expected, this movement has a distinct set of characteristics which follow from the nature of the probe. We close the paper with a discussion of word order more generally (as in Cinque (2005)) and a discussion of how head movement might fit into this typology.

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.

Verb-raising and VP-fronting in Japanese

It is challenging to make empirical arguments either for or against the existence of verb-raising in head-final languages like Japanese since word order facts are not informative in such languages unlike in head-initial languages such as English and French. This article aims to make a novel argument for the existence of verb-raising in Japanese, based on facts about VP-fronting.

The syntax, information structure, and prosody of German ‘VP’-fronting

This paper explores fronted verb phrases in German, drawing attention to the difference between passive/unaccusative VPs and fronted agentive vPs. While both kinds of verb phrases have been discussed in the literature as being frontable, it has been largely overlooked that fronted vPs typically come with a certain kind of post-fronting context and a rise-fall or bridge-contour intonation, which is characteristic of I-topicalization. We observe that, unlike VPs, agentive vPs essentially need to be I-topics, with a high tone at the right edge of the fronted domain, in order to be frontable. Given the special context required for fronted vPs, the situation described by the vP does not contain new information but must already have been under discussion and is now being commented on. We present the results of two experimental studies and appeal to the thetic/categorical distinction to offer a new angle on the definiteness effect that has been associated with fronted verb phrases. We propose that a subject-containing fronted vP is associated with a thetic rather than the default categorical judgment, which means that the fronted subject and predicate form only one information-structural unit (a topic) rather than two (topic and comment). Contributing to the literature on theticity, we observe that, unlike in non-fronting thetic statements, the subject in fronted vPs cannot be a true definite. We attribute this to clashing intonation restrictions on theticity in non-fronting constructions versus theticity in just the fronted portion of a sentence.

VP-fronting: Movement vs. dislocation

While VP-fronting in English has various properties that are generally taken to be hallmarks of $$\overline A $$ -movement, other properties of the construction militate against an analysis in terms of displacement of VP to the clausal periphery. Such an analysis falls short of providing principled answers to the questions of why the trace of VP-fronting must be nominal, why certain kinds of morphological mismatches between the fronted VP and its trace are possible, why fronting of remnant VPs is impossible, and others. This article proposes an analysis of English VP-fronting – plausibly extending to English ’topicalization’ in general – based on the observation that the construction shares these non-movement properties with left-dislocation of VP in German. Connectivity effects, on such an approach, are the result of ellipsis. By assimilating VP-fronting to dislocation, the analysis furnishes principled explanations for the striking asymmetries between English-type VP-fronting (dislocation) and German-type VP-fronting ( $$\overline A $$ -movement).

vP-fronting with and without remnant movement

In this paper, we consider two kinds of vP-fronting constructions in English and argue that they receive quite different analyses. First, we show that English vP-preposing does not have the properties that would be expected of a movement-derived dependency. Evidence for this conclusion is adduced from the licensing conditions on its occurrence, from the availability of morphological mismatches, and from reconstruction facts. By contrast, we show that English participle preposing is a well-behaved case of vP-movement, contrasting with vP-preposing with respect to reconstruction properties in particular. We propose that the differences between the two constructions follow from the interaction of two constraints: the excluded middle constraint (EMC), which rules out derivations involving spellout of linearly intermediate copies only, and the N-only constraint, which restricts movement to occurring where the trace position would license a nominal. The EMC rules out deriving vP-fronting by true movement and instead necessitates a base-generation analysis, while the N-only constraint ensures that participle preposing is only possible in limited circumstances.

The Syntax, Semantics, and Prosody of German "VP"-fronting

“VP”-fronting involving an unergative or transitive (agentive) vP depends on a rise-fall, bridge-contour intonation (Büring 1997) in order to be acceptable. (1) [/Ein Außenseiter gewonnen] hat hier noch nie. a.NOM outsider won has here yet never ‘It has never happened here that an outsider won.’ Furthermore, the fronted vP must express partially discourse-old information, have a non-specific/generic subject, and denote a proposition that is quantified over, not asserted. Pitch tracks show the bridge-contour ‘wrapping’ vP into one large prosodic (Intonational) phrase with a high edge tone, reducing vP-contained DPs to major phrases.