Czech left periphery: a preliminary analysis

Vol.64,No.1(2016)

Jiří Kašpar

Stable URL (handle):
http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/135451

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Abstract
The consensus in the more recent literature on the Czech left periphery is that postulating only one functional projection above the highest head of the I-domain is not sufficient to account for certain data. The available analyses differ in detail, but most of them assume that particles such as že ('that') and aby ('for') are complementisers that are located in the highest head of the C-domain. Another assumption that is often made is that clitics such as se ('oneself') appear in either the highest head of the I-domain or the lowest head of the C-domain. Under certain unspecified conditions, clitics can optionally move to some higher functional head. In the account of the Czech left periphery proposed below, the positional (in)flexibility of complementisers and clitics is reversed. More concretely, the twofold claim advocated below is that clitics appear in I, and that complementisers might appear in either C or I. It follows that že and aby should not always be labeled 'complementisers'. While the above assumptions account for most of the attested distributional patterns, it is necessary to further assume that že, but not aby, might lexicalise a functional head immediately above CP. This is necessary to explain why contrastive left dislocation can take place below že, but not aby. The fully articulated structure of the Czech left periphery is taken to be the following: [CP2 [C2 {že/*aby/Ø} ] [CP1 XP [CP1 [C1 {že/?(?)aby/Ø} ] [IP XP [IP [I {že/aby/Ø}+CL ] [vP … XP … ]]]]]]. (The curly brackets denote a set of mutually exclusive alternatives; the XP marks a possible landing site for X-bar movement.)

Keywords:
left periphery; CP-doubling; complementisers; resumptive pronouns; Czech

Pages:
71–88
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