Agreement, Predication, and the Rise of Functional Categories in Nonfinite Clauses

Abstract

This paper argues for the rise of functional categories in small clauses and bare infinitive complements by investigating their syntactic properties in the history of English. It is claimed that both of these nonfinite clause types have undergone morphological erosion that led to the rise of functional categories, where the theory of predication plays a crucial role in relating the two changes. Moreover, the structural changes of these two types of nonfinite clauses are shown to be neatly captured in terms of grammatical competition, with the structure with a new functional category competing with and gradually replacing the structure without it, in the transitional period of their historical development.*

Advances in Biolinguistics

“…The proposal here is based on the assumption that linguistic structures as well as lexical and morphological phenomena are vulnerable to exaptation. In Tanaka (2010) the rise of PredP in English infinitival constructions is discussed and Bowers (2002) argues about the existence of PredP in Icelandic. As explained in Li and Thompson (1976), from the typological point of view, languages in the world are divided into Topic Prominent Languages such as Japanese and Subject Prominent Languages such as PDE.…”