Verb Tense and Head Movement in English Syntax
Quite often, the verbal element is composite. On top of the lexical element V, we have some auxiliary-like element which marks the inflection for tense and person:
- She will/can/has/is go/going/gone
We will simply assume that such auxiliaries are in the T head. Now, how about cases where the verb is a single form with both the lexical element and the inflectional element together?
- She goes/went home
These are inflected forms, and we will have to assume that they involve both the V and the T heads. What do we mean by involve? Well, one easy way to relate them is via movement. The assumption is that morphology gives you the conjugated form went, a verbal form in the past tense in this case. You stick it in the V position and check that it is a verb. Then, one might move it to T and check the tense. The idea is that the different features of that word (verb, past) must be ‘checked, approved’ at the right positions: the ‘verb’ feature is, of course, approved of in the V head position, and the ‘past’ tense feature is approved in the T position. In order to do so, the verb will have to move from the V position to the T position (another instance of head-to-head movement).
If there is movement, where would one expect the V to be located? In T, and this works all right for many languages like Spanish and French, but perhaps not so easily for English. How could we know where the verb is? One way to know where the verb is is to use adverbs which are known to modify VPs and therefore mark the leftmost edge of the VP. In this respect, there is a very well-known difference between English and other languages like French (Spanish is more complicated because word order is far less fixed):
a. Jean embrasse souvent Marie
b. John often/seldom/never kisses Mary
What these two sentences seem to suggest is that in French the inflected verb is outside of the VP. What we can say is that the verb has moved to join T above, yet another instance of the by now famous head movement. But in English the situation is different. When we have auxiliaries there is no problem: they precede such adverbs, as expected if auxiliaries are in T and the verb is in V:
- John will often/never kiss Mary
- John has never been to Simondrogas
But when we look at (b) above, the English translation of the French sentence, it is as if the inflected verb were inside VP. So for a long time it was said that in English T lowers down to V. But this is not very elegant, since all movements go upwards. There are better alternatives, but they require a good knowledge of theoretical grammar and we don’t care too much in this class for those theoretical aspects. What you have to remember is that in English auxiliaries are in T but lexical verbs are in V. This will be crucial later on.
When we mention ‘auxiliaries’ we refer to a special behavior, say verbs that have the ability to move to T in English. When we look at a verb like BE we must realize that it always has the same behavior, whether it is a main verb or an auxiliary:
- John is seldom/never/often in his office
So this indicates that the main verb BE is exceptional and that it behaves like auxiliaries in moving up to T.
A last detail with respect to the T head and auxiliaries. We differentiated two types of auxiliaries: modals from be, have. One key difference is that modals do not have tenseless forms (canning, to can), while central auxiliaries do (to be, being…). This can be captured in two ways, and you can see grammarians working with any of the two assumptions.
a) Modals are intrinsically tensed elements that originate in the I head itself (thus, to can is completely impossible).
b) Modals are defective verbs which only have tensed forms. That means that, although they originate in V like any other verb (taking a VP complement, remember from the 1st semester), they will always have to move to T (put more technically, they always have a [present] or [past] feature which must be checked by moving them to T.)
On the other hand, central auxiliaries like have, be are just normal verbs, and can be tensed or tenseless. They are special in only two ways: a) they take other VP as complements, and b) unlike lexical verbs they can move up to T to check tense features.
Phrasal Movement to Spec,CP
The specifier of CP is a position to which many elements move in non-declarative, marked contexts. Unlike the C position, and like other specifier positions, this is a place for phrases. In what follows, we will first look at cases where there is only movement of a phrase to spec of CP. Later on, we will look at cases which combine phrasal movement to Spec,CP and head movement to C (T-to-C). You should be able to spot these movement in the following constructions:
Partial Exclamations
What a great concert it was!
How beautiful and elegant grammar is!
What a great discovery they made!
Relatives
The man to whom nobody gave instructions
The book which you wrote
In relative clauses, it is impossible to have both the Spec position and the head position filled by the complementizer, and one can choose one or the other:
The book that you wrote (the complementizer that is overt, no overt pronoun)
The book which you wrote (overt pronoun and covert complementizer)
Notice that that here is a complementizer, not a relative pronoun. As such, it can be deleted. In older forms of the language (and in some contemporary dialects) it was possible to have both at the same time, so one could get
The book which that you wrote
In the previous examples we only have one phrase moving to Spec,CP and that is it. However, in most cases, whenever this happens a second concomitant movement takes place, the same one described above whereby V/T move to C. The result is that we end up with an element in first position (Spec,CP) and a verbal head in the second position (remember that only those verbal elements that could be in T can move further up to C in these ‘marked’ constructions). This is referred to as the V2 phenomenon. In general, this second movement (T-to-C) does not take place in embedded clauses, like the relative clauses above.
Wh-Questions
These illustrate what we have seen up to now. In main/direct/root questions we have movement of a wh-phrase to Spec of CP and also T-to-C. In embedded/indirect questions we only find movement of a phrase to Spec,CP. There is no T-to-C, so no ‘inversion’, the verb remains unmoved:
Direct Wh-Questions
Who has John seen today?
Where did you go yesterday?
Where are you now?
Indirect (Embedded Wh-Questions)
I don’t know who John has seen today
He asked you where you went yesterday
Tell me where you are now
Spanish seems to work differently here, since both direct and indirect questions involve V2 effects. On the other hand, some varieties of English also present interesting differences. For instance, Belfast English has the following embedded question types:
I don’t know which street that he lives in
As we see, this dialect allows both for the Spec,CP and the head C position to be filled, just as in earlier relatives.
Negative Inversion
Only then did he understand
Under no circumstances will I condone with such activities
Inversion Structures
John read the article and so did Peter
John is a pacifist, and so am I
On the other hand, unlike wh-questions and partial exclamatives, there are yes/no questions and exclamatives. Look at the following phrases and describe which movements affects them:
Yes/No Questions and Exclamatives
Is John home?
Does John eat peanuts in class?
Is she happy!
Have you grown!
Semanticists usually assume that in fact there is a covert/silent yes/no element in the Spec,CP of these structures, so that, in fact, they would be totally parallel to wh-questions (c) or partial exclamatives (a).
Summary of Key Concepts
We saw in class that
- Auxiliaries are the only Vs that move up to T when they are tensed; lexical verbs remain in V
- In marked contexts like questions, exclamatives, relatives, etc., wh-words (or phrases containing them) and some other phrases move to the specifier position of CP
- In many, mostly root (=main) contexts of the sentence types in 2, there is also T-to-C. This usually happens in root clauses because the embedded clauses C is ‘filled’ by the complementizer, so nothing can move there. T-to-C produces ‘inversion’ patterns.
Given the structure of the CP, this means that in some special sentence types, you may find the following two positions in the left periphery of the clause: XP aux subject, where XP is the ‘special’ phrase (usually wh-phrase) moved to the specifier position, aux is the T that has moved there (an auxiliary verb or the tense feature supported by the auxiliary do to make it pronounceable), and the subject is the beginning of the TP structure