| Popis: |
In this chapter, I propose a novel theory to explain the syntactic and semantic characteristics of a class of previously lesser studied verb modifiers, namely the non-heads of compound verbs like double-check and hand-wash. Such verb-internal modifiers are more widely used in English contrary to common impression, and they are also a very productive compounding strategy in East Asian languages like Chinese and Japanese. However, in the familiar European languages they are either systematically missing (e.g. in Romance languages) or subject to odd movement constraints (e.g. in German), even when these languages do not equally lack compound nouns. The theory I propose makes use of a defective categorizer that bears a lexically unvalued categorial feature. It agrees with the categorial feature on the base verb and results in a word-internal adjunction structure. The model is solely based on Simplest Merge without resorting to Pair Merge or Root incorporation, can be readily extended to the nominal domain, and nicely relates the typology of verb-internal modifiers to the parametrization of verb movement. |
