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Conditional clauses, Main Clause Phenomena and the syntax of polarity emphasis
- Author(s): Lieven Danckaert 1 and Liliane Haegeman 1
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View Affiliations Hide AffiliationsAffiliations:1 Universiteit Gent
- Source: Comparative Germanic Syntax , pp 133-168
- Publication Date August 2012
This paper addresses two properties of conditional clauses: (i) their incompatibility with Main Clause Phenomena (MCP), exemplified by English argument fronting, and (ii) the unavailability of Speaker Oriented Adverbs (Ernst 2009) (SpOAs). The paper elaborates the hypothesis (Bhatt & Pancheva 2002, 2006) that conditionals are derived by operator movement: the absence of MCP then follows from locality conditions. Adopting the cartographic approach to SpOAs (Cinque 1999), we propose that the operator which derives conditionals originates in SpecMoodirrealis. This implementation of the movement derivation accounts for the unavailability of SpOAs. The final part of the paper extends the range of MCP: it shows that polarity emphasis is not a homogeneous phenomenon: certain expressions of emphatic polarity are MCP and hence unavailable in conditionals, while others are not restricted to root domains.
- Affiliations: 1: Universiteit Gent
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