Czech left periphery: a preliminary analysis

Title: Czech left periphery: a preliminary analysis
Variant title:
  • Levá periferie v češtině: předběžná analýza
Author: Kašpar, Jiří
Source document: Linguistica Brunensia. 2016, vol. 64, iss. 1, pp. 71-88
Extent
71-88
  • ISSN
    1803-7410 (print)
    2336-4440 (online)
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
 

Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.

Abstract(s)
The consensus in the more recent literature on the Czech left periphery is that postulating only one functional projection above the highest head of the I-domain is not sufficient to account for certain data. The available analyses differ in detail, but most of them assume that particles such as že ('that') and aby ('for') are complementisers that are located in the highest head of the C-domain. Another assumption that is often made is that clitics such as se ('oneself') appear in either the highest head of the I-domain or the lowest head of the C-domain. Under certain unspecified conditions, clitics can optionally move to some higher functional head. In the account of the Czech left periphery proposed below, the positional (in)flexibility of complementisers and clitics is reversed. More concretely, the twofold claim advocated below is that clitics appear in I, and that complementisers might appear in either C or I. It follows that že and aby should not always be labeled 'complementisers'. While the above assumptions account for most of the attested distributional patterns, it is necessary to further assume that že, but not aby, might lexicalise a functional head immediately above CP. This is necessary to explain why contrastive left dislocation can take place below že, but not aby. The fully articulated structure of the Czech left periphery is taken to be the following: [CP2 [C2 {že/*aby/Ø} ] [CP1 XP [CP1 [C1 {že/?(?)aby/Ø} ] [IP XP [IP [I {že/aby/Ø}+CL ] [vP … XP … ]]]]]]. (The curly brackets denote a set of mutually exclusive alternatives; the XP marks a possible landing site for X-bar movement.)
Note
The research reported in this paper was carried out at University College London and was sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).
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