Root infinitives: A comparative view

Abstract

Investigating Root Infinitive constructions (RIs) in the adult grammar, we concentrate on a comparative view between English and Spanish. Through a careful study of the syntactic and semantic properties of RIs, and their cross-linguistic differences, we present strong arguments for the internal structure of RIs that we propose: English RIs are deficient TPs, while Spanish RIs have an additional Comp-related functional projection FP on top. This structural difference accounts for the syntactic similarities and differences in RIs in the two languages. On the semantic side, we propose that RIs are indefinite descriptions of events. RIs crucially involve two related terms, the RI itself (John read this book?!) and the Coda (That’s impossible!), where the relating predicate is an exclamative operator with scalar properties akin to the focus particle even. We show that the RI, the exclamative operator and the Coda form a tripartite structure both syntactically and semantically, in the sense of other standard analyses of quantificational constructions. Differences in temporal interpretation are shown t o derive from the existence of the tripartite structure and the (un)availability of infinitival verb movement.

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