영어의 장소구 도치 구문의 결함적 경동사구 분석

Abstract

It has been generally assumed that the locative inversion in English as Behind the tree stood a tall man undergoes at least two processes against the canonical word order. The locative prepositional phrase (PP) is inverted with the main verb (V), and at the same time the subject noun phrase (NP) with that verb. This paper argues that there are no such processes for the locative inversion construction. Rather, the construction is derived by external and internal merge in terms of information structure such as topic and focus. We propose a defective vP analysis that assumes a focus domain and permits a non-thematic external merger.