Pseudo-incorporation and its movement patterns

Abstract

While movement of pseudo-incorporated arguments seems to be restricted generally, there is considerable variation across languages to what extend dislocation can take place. Whereas Turkish, German, and Hindi have been shown to allow for certain movement operations, pseudo-incorporated objects in Tamil for example are argued to require surface adjacency with the verb. This paper provides new evidence against surface adjacency in Tamil. More importantly, the study points out a striking parallel between movement of pseudo-incorporated objects and the respective VP-movement patterns within Tamil, Mongolian, Turkish, and German. Pseudo-incorporated objects are argued to constitute partially verbal categories, which explains the movement patterns, along with two other trademark properties of pseudo-incorporation – lack of case marking and scope inertness.