Workshop for PhD students and young researchers

Grand Meeting for Scandinavian Dialect Syntax
Leikanger, 25 August 2005

The infinitival marker across Scandinavian

Ken Ramshøj Christensen, University of Aarhus

The Scandinavian languages and English show interesting distributional differences in infinitival clauses. Some of them allow the so-called split infinitive, others do not depending on the type of adverbial, i.e. VP- or sentential adverbial/negation occupying different structural positions.

I will present a new analysis of the structure of infinitives, more specifically the base-position and possible Spell-Out positions of the infinitive marker. I shall argue that the former is universally fixed as the head of a functional projection within the VP-domain, while the latter is subject to parametric variation. For example, Swedish has obligatory movement to Iº (= the topmost functional head in the IP-domain), while Norwegian has optional movement to both Tº and Iº. Such an analysis is, as far as I know, different from what is standardly assumed.

It will be shown that Icelandic has movement to Iº in control infinitives and I argue that this movement is driven by the presence of the infinitival marker að. It is not the verb itself that checks the phi-features on Iº; it is the infinitive marker to which the infinitive verb is incorporated.

This analysis has important implications for the analysis of non-control infinitives such as ECM constructions. In particular, I present new data from Icelandic to support my analysis, which shows that negation in fact can be used as an indicator for the lack of movement in ECM constructions, contrary to what is generally assumed.