Carson Schutze: "light" verbs in English (reply to Martha McGinnis)

[Martha McGinnis]

Martha said:

>Doesn't this alternative raise just as many questions as the
>verb-raising account?  Rather than asking why 'have' and 'be', but
>not other verbs, can raise past Neg, we'd have to ask why 'have' and
>'be', but not other verbs, can be inserted above Neg.

I was suggesting a direction to go in answering that, namely that they are
inserted by a different process from contentful verbs, namely as last-resorts
for satisfying some morphosyntactic requirement that wouldn't otherwise be met
with a nonverbal predicate (I think of it as Tense c-selecting for a V, 'cause
I don't really believe we can get rid of c-selection for functional heads, but
there are surely alternatives). The reason they are inserted high is because
they're inserted right next to the thing that requires a V, namely Tense.

>And if these
>verbs can be inserted 'high', we're at a loss to explain why the (c)
>examples in (1) and (2) are out.
>
>(1) a.	She has probably prepared her lectures.
>     b.	She will probably have prepared her lectures.
>     c.?*She will have probably prepared her lectures.
>
>(2) a.	She is probably preparing her lectures.
>     b.	She will probably be preparing her lectures.
>     c.?*She will be probably preparing her lectures.

OK, first of all, my original message was only intended to be about *finite*
be/have, since those are the only things that allegedly could raise over Neg
in the "standard" analysis. So at a minimum, one could say that "infinitival"
'be'/have' are different creatures from the inflected ones. There is some
precedent for that in the literature, usually by people who want to say that
finite 'be' supports the Tense *affix*. That's not my proposal, however, and
I think one can maintain a more unified treatment of finite & nonfinite cases,
under which they are all last resorts. The idea for getting Martha's contrasts
would then be that finite 'be', because it's finite, can raise higher than any
nonfinite 'be' (participial or infinitival), or to put it the other way
'round, in Martha's (c) sentences the modal is filling up the position to
which finite 'be' would have raised, hence even if it is inserted for the same
reason, it cannot wind up as high. (This will require having another head
position around, I think.)

I think somewhere Kayne tried to argue that finite be/have are not as high as
modals in English, which might be problematic for my suggestion. However, I
didn't agree with any of his crucial judgments. :-)