Abstract
It is a widely accepted generalization that verbal periphrasis is triggered by increased inflectional meaning and a paucity of verbal elements to support its realization. This work examines the limitations on synthetic verbal forms in Ndebele and argues that periphrasis in this language arises via a last-resort grammatical mechanism. The proposed trigger of auxiliary insertion is c-selection – a relation between inflectional categories and verbs.
Highlights
This paper focuses on the mechanics of default periphrasis – a phenomenon where a default verb appears in a complex inflectional context
The type of verbal periphrasis we find in Ndebele is known as the overflow pattern of auxiliary use (Bjorkman, 2011), and is illustrated in (1),2 where Present Perfect and Simple Future are synthetic, but Future Perfect is periphrastic (1-c)
While the link between auxiliary insertion and c-selection has been previously proposed for English (Cowper, 2010; Déchaine, 1995), the mechanism of auxiliary insertion developed there is incompatible with the type of periphrasis found in Ndebele, namely the overflow pattern
Summary
This paper focuses on the mechanics of default periphrasis – a phenomenon where a default verb (an auxiliary) appears in a complex inflectional context. The auxiliary is necessarily present in both (6) and (7) – there are no conditions under which either of the structures could give rise to synthetic forms This type of analysis is compatible with the additive pattern of auxiliary use, found in English, where a particular inflection (here, the progressive aspect) never appears without an auxiliary. Recent literature offers a series of accounts of inflectional periphrasis as a last-resort mechanism (Schütze, 2003; Cowper, 2010; Bjorkman, 2011; Arregi & Klecha, 2015): accounts where VAux neither projects a VP, nor spells out a functional head All these accounts rely on the assumption that inflection must combine with a verb. I propose that this mechanism is c-selection and present the details of its application
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