Adjunction and filler

[Tibor Kiss]

Hi,

thanks for your swift replies.

Some tentative remarks: The interesting point is that you *cannot* adjoin to
a head filler phrase in German (i.e. to a verb-second clause). But you can
adjoin to head filler phrases in English and French.

Neither English nor French is a V2 language. It seems to me that in V2
languages (Dutch people, what do you think?) the clausal projection actually
has something functional (CP or what) to it.

If this seems to be the right lead, we can perhaps derive a fundamental but
quite abstract syntactic difference between English/French and German: while
the latter language has clauses of category CP, English and French
wh-constructions are basically projections of V.

So we could argue that Subject-Auxiliary-Inversion in English is actually
the result of schema 3, but that an apparently similar clause in German
should not be derived in the same way (this goes against 'head
non-movement').

T.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof. Dr. Tibor Kiss -- Sprachwissenschaftliches Institut
Ruhr-Universität Bochum, D-44780 Bochum
+49-234-3225114 // +49-177-7468265 // +49-234-3214137 (fax)
What is present now will later be past.
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