Verbflexion und funktionale Kategorien im Französischen

Abstract

It is argued that the standard analysis of French finite and infinite clauses in the GB framework by means of two movement operations (V-raising and I-lowering) as well as Pollock's (1989) approach based on the split-Infl-hypothesis cannot be maintained because of serious conceptual defects, relating particularly to the concepts of functional category, head movement, and basic syntactic unit. An alternative non-transformational analysis is proposed which covers the same range of data as Pollock 1989. The new analysis is based on the following assumptions: (i) Only those functional elements may be said to belong to PS categories whose realizations combine with other syntactic elements in a purely concatenative way; these categories are unable to project to higher bar levels by themselves. (ii) No syntactic category Infl can be said to exist in French. (iii) French inflected verbs are inserted as syntactic atoms in D-structure, their syntactic category being given by the feature specification [+V, -N, ±finite]; participles have the category given as [+V], i.e. they are unspecified for [±N] or [±finite]. (iv) Non-lexical categorial specifications such as [±finite] or [±negation] are co-projected to higher bar levels together with the lexical categorial feature specifications [±N] and [±V]; this process involves unification of the categorial specifications making up the node labels of an adjunction-like subtree. (v) Syntactic atoms (lacking any bar specification) must be distinguished from zero bar projections; only the latter may dominate amalgams of syntactic atoms. What is usually called head movement must be split into Move-X and Move-X°; X-movement (if it exists) can only be tantamount to moving a syntactic atom of category X into an empty X position: it never yields a Chomsky adjunction. (vi) Predicate modifiers adjoin to verbal projections of bar level zero or one, never to maximal verbal projections (i.e. clauses). (vii) In French nominative Case is assig