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Tense/Mood/Aspect-agreeing Infinitivals is an in-depth investigation of the
syntax of verb-verb agreement phenomena in Swedish, including
pseudocoordinations of the form "John started and wrote," 'John started
writing' and double participles of the form "John had been-able written,"
'John had been able to write.' Providing evidence from facts concerning
extraction, locality, selection, and interpretation, the book argues that
the relevant construction types all involve surface variants of
"infinitives in disguise" - infinitivals that agree with the matrix clause
in tense/mood/aspect. Arguments are presented in favour of taking the
dependencies underlying the agreement to be instances of Agree between
functional heads of the same label, a configuration that yields
restructuring/clause-union.
The main theoretical contributions of the book are:
(i) Agreement is proportional to functional structure:
The possibility of "copying" a particular morpho-syntactic form is
contingent on the presence of the corresponding functional projection in
the agreeing XP.
(ii) Size constancy between restructuring/non-restructuring infinitivals:
The category selected by a verb may remain constant between restructuring
and non-restructuring configurations.
It is suggested that an important aspect of restructuring may be
alternation between unmarked (negatively specified) features and unvalued
varieties of the same features, capturing properties such as
"tenselessness," "finitelessness," etc. of restructuring infinitivals. The
book is an important contribution to the syntax of infinitival clauses, the
syntax of clause-union/restructuring, and more generally to the syntax of
agreement phenomena in natural language. In addition, it provides a general
reference source for anyone interested in the syntax of Swedish and other
Scandinavian languages.
Of Interest To:
Research Libraries, Scholars and Students of Linguistics, anyone working on
Scandinavian Languages, especially Descriptive and Theoretical Syntax of
Scandinavian Languages.
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