Deriving preverbal position in a verb-final language: the case of Hittite

Abstract

The paper presents an analysis of clause structure in Hittite, a coherently head-final language with SOV word order and an elaborated preverbal position hosting various functional elements of the clause. We argue that the best approach to capturing these phenomena is to assume a universally right-branching structure coupled with phrasal movement driven by selectional feature checking under adjacency of relevant heads.