5 research outputs found
Bericht ĂŒber den VII. KongreĂ der Internationalen Vereinigung fĂŒr Germanische Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft. (Göttingen, 25.-30. August 1985)
The fundamental left-right asymmetry in the Germanic verb cluster
Cinque (2005, 2009, 2014a) observes that there is an asymmetry in the possible ordering of dependents of a lexical head before versus after the head. A reflection on some of the concepts needed to develop Cinqueâs ideas into a theory of neutral word order reveals that dependents need to be treated separately by class. The resulting system is applied to the problem of word order in the Germanic verb cluster. It is shown that there is an extremely close match between theoretically derived expectations for clusters made up of auxiliaries, modals, causative âletâ, a main verb, and verbal particles. The facts point to the action of Cinqueâs fundamental left-right asymmetry in language in the realm of the verb cluster. At the same time, not all verb clusters fall under Cinqueâs generalization, which, therefore, argues against treating all cases of restructuring uniformly