Abstract for Bill Haddican's talk

Two kinds of restructuring infinitives in Basque
Bill Haddican (New York University)
May 10, 2005 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 6417, the CUNY Graduate Center

Bonet (1991) has claimed that the Person Case Constraint (*me lui constraint), banning the co-occurrence of a 3rd person dative clitic and a 1st or 2nd person accusative clitic, is a universal condition governing the distribution of pronominal clitics.

Recent monoclausal approaches to restructuring come in two flavors. Cinque (2004) and Cardinaletti and Shlonsky (2004) propose that restructuring is always and everywhere between a main verb and a higher functional head of the same functional sequence. In contrast, Wurmbrand (2001, 2004) argues that "lexical" restructuring must also be admitted; that is, lexical verbs in V may, under certain conditions, restructure with a small verbal complement. In this talk, I discuss evidence from two kinds of restructuring infinitives in Basque, which supports the latter view. Both kinds of infinitives are transparent to long distance agreement, reminiscent of clitic climbing in Romance. Different properties of these infinitives, however, suggest that they have different functional structures. Infinitives with the affixes -tu/-i/-n/-O (depending on the verb class) are InfinPs, a vP-internal projection that restructures with a higher functional head of the same functional sequence. In contrast, -t(z)e infinitives are minimally AspPs that restructure with a verb in VP.