Sentence polarity and word order in Basque

Abstract

A well-known fact about Basque is that word order is sensitive to sentence polarity. In negative sentences, the relative order of the auxiliary and main verb is V-Aux, while in affirmative (neutral) sentences the order is Neg-Aux-V. The main goal of this paper is to argue for a new approach to this phenomenon within a grammar that assumes antisymmetry (Kayne 1994), and only XP movement. The proposal has two main components. First, drawing on Cinque's (1999) universal hierarchy of functional heads, it argues that the negative order-Aux-V-is the merged order. The affirmative V-Aux order is produced by raising of the VP to a higher, polarity-related position called PolP.Second, PolP is also argued to host the negative morpheme, ez, in negative sentences, and the emphatic marker, ba, in emphatic affirmatives. Evidence from scope interaction between negation and evidential and speech act particles suggests that the surface position of ez cannot be its merged position; rather ez is merged in a lower position and raises to spec, PolP.Part 1 of this paper discusses the surface ordering of clausal functional heads within Cinque's (1999) framework, and argues for VP raising in affirmative sentences.Part 2 argues for raising of ez to PolP. Part 3 discusses the behavior of verbal dependents drawing on Koopman and Szabolcsi's (2000) analysis of verb movement in Hungarian, German and Dutch. Part 4 addresses some remaining empirical problems.

Some Implications of a Copy Theory of Labeling

“…Biberauer, Holmberg & Roberts (, to appear), citing Haddican (), show that this same gap holds synchronically in Basque as well as both synchronically and diachronically in all known varieties of Germanic. This underlines the curious thing about this generalization: it appears to be a hierarchical universal, and yet it holds even in languages with variable word order, in which the ungrammatical order (*V–O–Aux) is arguably derived via movement.…”

“…Heads generally c‐command their complements (unless movement has occurred), but VO and OV orders appear to occur with roughly equal frequency (Dryer ) and the many asymmetries cited by Kayne fail to concern the order of head and complement, as, Richards () and Abels & Neeleman () note. Although in some nonrigid OV languages there is good evidence that OV order is derived via narrow syntactic movement (see Zwart on Dutch and Haddican on Basque), this is not so clearly true of all OV languages . In fact, some head‐final languages present a formidable challenge for the LCA.…”

Question particles in Basque

“…Furthermore, recent research (Haddican 2006 In what follows, I will briefly explain why these particles have been previously grouped together.…”

Datives and Adpositions in Northeastern Basque

“…8 For the sake of exposition, I adopt a head-final representation for the adpositional phrases here. For the antisymmetry hypothesis as it applies to Basque, see Haddican, 2001Haddican, , 2004, and the papers in Arteatx et alia (2008). See also footnote 7.…”

“…It is composed at least by the VP patatak jan "eat potatoes" a nominalizing affix -te normally associated to clausal nominalizations, and the inessive suffix -n, which selects an interval within the time boundaries of the eating event (see Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria, 2000, 2004, for an analysis of progressive forms in the context of a topological approach to Tense and aspect relations). Minimally contrasting with (85a) is (85b), which involves the same nominalized base as (85a) but contains a determiner between the nominalizing suffix and the inessive.…”