Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

V‐Positions and the Middle Field in West Flemish

1998; Wiley; Volume: 1; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1467-9612.00010

1467-9612

Liliane Haegeman,

Linguistics and language evolution

The distribution of the finite verb in the West Flemish Infinitivus Pro Participio construction provides evidence for embedded V‐movement in the lower Middle Field of the West Germanic SOV languages. Two functional heads are postulated in the lower Middle Field, F1 (which checks Tense and Negation) and F2 (which checks aspect). FP1 dominates FP2. Finite verbs may remain in F2, or move to F1 (depending on feature strength), infinitives remain in F2. The analysis accounts for the finite/non‐finite asymmetery in the distribution of the negative head en in West Flemish and provides indirect support for Kayne’s antisymmetry hyposthesis. West Flemish bare infinitival complements remain to the right of F2, IPP complements occupy the specifier position of FP2, and past participles incorporate to F1. A parallelism between DP positions and the positions of non‐finite verbal complements is explored in the final part of the paper.