An LFG account of the danish verbal complex and its topicalization

Abstract

In LFG auxiliaries are currently treated as junctional categories contributing tense and aspectual information, but no predicate. The benefits of this analysis are that the auxiliary complex is associated with a flat f-structure regardless of whether the tenses are realized morphologically or periphrastically. Under this analysis it is, however, difficult to account for the morphosyntactic dependencies holding between the auxiliaries and the dependent main verb. This check has been relegated to a separate morphological projection (Butt et al. 1996, Frank and Zaenen 2002). In a previous paper (Wedekind and ørsnes 2003) we developed an alternative approach that provides flat f-structures for auxiliary constructions without an additional morphological projection and the problems related to it. This new approach was illustrated by an account of the Danish verbal complex, including complex tenses, passives and modals. In the present paper we extend our account to VP-topicalization, which has not been addressed in the projection approaches.