Particles and phonologically defective predicates

Abstract

Aniko Csirmaz MIT, 2001 * I would like to acknowledge the help of the organizers and participants of the workshops on verbal clusters within the Dutch-Hungarian Study Center (under the Third Memorandum of Understanding of NIAS), and especially that of Huba Bartos, Michael Brody, Katalin É. Kiss, and Csaba Olsvay. 1 In this paper I will only discuss those auxiliaries that trigger restructuring in Germanic and in Hungarian (particle climbing or rollup). Thus under the term auxiliary I only include these kinds of verbs in the paper, and the descriptions are not meant to hold for all auxiliaries within the language under discussion. For a description and classification of auxiliaries, the reader is referred to Kálmán et al. 1989.

Verbal particles inside and outsidevP

“…Here I merely wish to point at some evidence-often under-acknowledged in earlier literature (e.g., Brody 1990;É. Kiss 1994;Csirmaz 2004)-that both the particle (more generally, the VM) and the verb are outside of the verb phrase at the surface. This is what the pattern exhibited by VP-ellipsis in the language suggests.…”

“…There is no detectable difference between the two examples either in terms of acceptability, or in terms of focus structure. Csirmaz (2004) assumes that roll-up is not available with unambiguously phrasal VMs, based on a perceived contrast between (24a) and (24b) below ((24b) is judged by her to be unacceptable; see Koopman-Szabolcsi (2000, 21: (19b)) for a similar example). However, phrasal VMs do not generally resist taking part in roll-up, as examples (25)- (27) illustrate.…”

Predicate movement

“…The proposal we will give here builds on earlier proposals by Komlósy (1989), Szendrői (2004) and Csirmaz (2004) that certain types of verbs, which they dub stress-avoiding verbs, normally do not take neutral, main sentential stress. The general idea is that since stress is assigned ''to the leftmost phonological word in the leftmost phonological phrase of the intonational phrase'', the finite verb will be assigned stress if it is not preceded by some other constituent in its intonational phrase (see Szendrői, 2004, for a more detailed discussion).…”

The syntax of emphatic positive polarity in Hungarian: Evidence from ellipsis

“…Kiss (2002). PredP is assumed by those that consider VMs to be predicative in nature, such as Csirmaz (2004), É. Kiss (2005Kiss ( , 2006 among others.…”

“…Kiss 2006, Csirmaz 2004, or Spec,TP (Olsvay 2000, Surányi 2009a. In this paper, I adopt Surányi's approach and take VMs to occupy Spec,TP in overt syntax, coupled with the assumption that finite verbs raise to T (Brody 1990b, Kenesei 1998, Surányi 2009a, and that infinitives raise to T, too (Kenesei 2001).…”