Syntactic restrictions on infinitival imperatives in Czech

• Authors: Kucerova Ivona
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper discusses syntactic restrictions on infinitival imperatives in Czech. The authoress argues that for an infinitival imperative to be well-formed, there must be syntactic material asymmetrically c-commanding V in the phase (cyclic domain) of the imperative. She compares this restriction to other cross-linguistic restrictions on roots: in particular, she shows that the behavior of Czech infinitival imperatives is parallel to restrictions on middle constructions in English. In particular, the authoress argues that for the English middle constructions to be well-formed, there must be syntactic material asymmetrically c-commanding v. Finally, she discusses Czech infinitival imperatives in the context of Surrogate Negative Imperative languages. She argues that the differences between Surrogate Negative Imperative languages, i.e. languages that ban negative inflected imperatives, and Czech follow from morpho-syntactic differences in negation in this class of languages and Czech.

Keywords

EN

CZECH; ENGLISH; MIDDLES; NEGATIVE IMPERATIVES; WELL-FORMEDNESS OF SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Institute of the Czech Language, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Slovo a slovesnost: časopis pro otázky teorie a kultury jazyka (Slovo a slovesnost: A journal for the theory of language and language cultivation)
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 70
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 305-314
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Kucerova Ivona

• Ivona Kucerova, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, L8S 4M2, Canada; http://dlib.lib.cas.cz/4666/

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

09CZAAAA067814