Conditional clauses, Main Clause Phenomena and the syntax of polarity emphasis

Lieven Danckaert (1) , Liliane Haegeman (1)

1 GIST - Generative Initiatives in Syntactic Theory

This paper addresses two properties of conditional clauses: (i) their incompatibility with Main Clause Phenomena, exemplified by English argument fronting, and (ii) the unavailability of Speaker Oriented Adverbs (Ernst 2009) (SpOA). The paper elaborates the hypothesis (Bhatt and Pancheva 2002, 2006) that conditional clauses are derived by operator movement. The absence of MCP follows from locality conditions. Adopting the cartographic approach to SpOAs developed in Cinque (1999), it is proposed that the operator which derives conditionals originates in SpecMood irrealis. This specific implementation of the movement derivation will account for the unavailability of SpOAs in conditional clauses. The final part of the paper extends the range of MCP: it shows that polarity emphasis is not a homogeneous phenomenon: certain expressions of emphatic polarity are MCP and hence unavailable in conditional clauses, while others are not restricted to root domains.

Mots clés: conditionals; cartography; intervention; polarity emphasis

Domaines: Linguistique

Lieven Danckaert, Liliane Haegeman. Conditional clauses, Main Clause Phenomena and the syntax of polarity emphasis. Ackema, Peter; Alcorn, Rhona; Heycock, Caroline; Jaspers, Dany; van Craenenbroeck, Jeroen; Vanden Wyngaerd, Guido. Comparative Germanic syntax: the state of the art, John Benjamins, pp.133-167, 2012, Comparative Germanic syntax: the state of the art, 9789027255747. ⟨10.1075/la.191.05dan⟩. ⟨halshs-01534968⟩