Adult Root Infinitives

Adult Root Infinitives (ARIs) are a variety of infinitival structures occurring in root (i.e. main clause/independent) contexts. A central feature that distinguishes ARIs from other root infinitives (RIs, e.g. infinitival wh-questions) is their pragmatic meaning: incredulity towards a previously uttered proposition. Other notable aspects are the cross-linguistic availability of ARIs (an Indo-European phenomenon), and the morphosyntactic variation across these languages (e.g. variable Subject Case, or an optional coordinator). As an apparently impoverished and idiosyncratic syntagm, ARIs have often been put forth to argue against generativist-derivational theories of syntax (e.g. Fillmore et al. 1988, Lambrecht 1990). Taking sides with Etxepare & Grohmann (2002 et seq.), I argue that the ARI can well be subsumed under generalised derivational principle like those of Minimalist Syntax (cf. Chomsky 1995 et seq.). The more general discussion of various aspects of the ARI is followed by a sketch of a syntax of (non)finiteness couched within a phase-based minimalist framework. 1 Preliminary remarks This paper deals with a syntactic construction referred to as Adult Root Infinitive (ARI; cf. Etxepare & Grohmann 2002 et seq.). The major part (section 2) is a survey of the grammatical properties of the ARI, mainly a condensed version of Wenger (2008), with occasional supplements. Section 3 updates the analysis to the most recent syntactic framework in the Chomskyan tradition (phase-based minimalism; cf. Chomsky 2001 et seq.). 2 Grammatical properties Although the focus of this paper is on the morphosyntactic dimension of ARIs, I will first outline some of their other, not strictly grammatical (i.e. syntactic) features, ranging from prosodic to acquisitional properties, in order for the reader to get a feel for it. 2.1 Discourse-pragmatics, prosody, semantics & ontogenetic variation As shown in the following mini-discourse (speaker A – speaker B), the illocutionary force of the ARI is to express incredulity (orthographically marked by „! ‟) towards a previously uttered proposition (within a reference turn; cf. Bücker 2008 1 ). Typically, it is preceded by another, simplex interjection of incredulity (What! ), and/or followed by a dissentive expression confirming the incredulity raised by the preceding ARI. (1) A: I heard Quagmire‟s preparing a paper for the forthcoming MLC18 proceedings. – B: What! Him prepare a paper! No way, dude! He‟s got other things on his mind. The incredulity expressed by the ARI also correlates with a distinct prosodic structure: the Subject obligatorily bears focal stress (represented by caps), and the intonation contour of ARIs is final-rising (a global rise, typical of open interrogatives; represented by „[↑]‟) 2 . 1 Hence one of its alternative labels Incredulity Response Construction, due to Lambrecht (1990). 2 There‟s seems to exist a prosodic variant with falling intonation (orthographically marked by „.‟ instead of „! ‟) and unfocussed Subject: Yeah, yeah. Him like books.Whatever you say. In this case, however, the ARI seems to express something like „non-genuine incredulity‟, with a sarcastic undertone. Although I won‟t be discussing this prosodic alternant, the syntactic (pragmatics notwithstanding) analysis presented in sections 3 should carry over to it. (2) HIM prepare a paper [↑]! Another property of the ARI, reflected in its attribute adult, is that it is restricted to adult registers. This is an important qualification since root infinitives (RIs) are far from uncommon in child language – indeed, at least during one stage of language acquisition, Child Root Infinitives (CRIs) make up the majority of utterances (cf. Rizzi 1993; (3) from Radford 1990). (3) a. Baby eat cookies. – CRI b. The baby eat cookies! – ARI However, despite the formal resemblance of CRIs to ARIs, they differ in one crucial respect: CRIs may in principle have one of a whole range of aspectual, temporal, and modal, as well as illocutionary meanings – a degree of polysemy (or, grammatical underspecification) that presumably needs (post-syntactic) disambiguation based on contextual information (cf. Avrutin‟s 1999 approach to RIs). Accordingly, (3) may be variably translated into adult English as „The baby eats/is eating/ate/should eat/. cookies‟. ARIs, on the other hand, are rather specialised in that they can only carry what might be dubbed incredulitive force (as discussed above). Interestingly, the functional domains of CRIs and ARIs seem to be mutually exclusive: CRIs can express almost any of the aforementioned meanings, with the exception of incredulity, to which, in turn, ARIs are restricted. This opposition is also reflected in the relative frequency of ARIs vs. CRIs in natural discourse: While CRIs – as pointed out above – are an omnipresent phenomenon of child language, ARIs seem to occur considerably less frequently in adult speech 3 . Finally, in addition to its special incredulitive force, there is another feature that distinguishes ARIs from CRIs, which is the irrealis semantics typical of infinitives: they denote situations/propositions evaluated w.r. t. a nonactual („unreal‟, hence irrealis) world. CRIs, on the other hand, may be realis in that they can be used to assert 4 . With this rough outline of the prosodic and discourse-pragmatic properties of ARIs, including a brief comparison of ARIs with CRIs, I now turn to the morphosyntactic characterisation of ARIs.