Notes on Clause Structure

Abstract

The present article will review, and elaborate upon, some of the many recent proposals concerning sentential functional projections, verb incorporation and “checking theory” (see Chomsky 1992) that have been published or circulated in recent years. In particular an effort will be made to identify the various functional projections distinguished under the so-called “Split Inflection Hypothesis” (henceforth SIH) in English and French and develop a theory of what it is that makes them [±strong] or [±opaque], in the terminology of Pollock (1989), Chomsky (1989) and Chomsky (1992).

This article was written in 1992. I had planned to revise it for publication in this volume by including comments on, and alternatives to, the relevant literature published between 1987 and 1995. (Un)fortunately the amount of work on clause structure and functional projections done over the last five years is so staggering that it has forced me to take a more realistic view of what ground I could cover in an introductory article. I have therefore pretty much stuck to the original text. Had I tried to integrate the more recent forward in Chomsky (1995: chapter 4) I would have had to rewrite the article entirely and the points it does make would have been lost. For some suggestions see Pollock (1997, Chapter 13). The text of this article is based on may notes for a class on funtional structure I taught in Montreal in June and July 1991 and Seouls, Korea, in July 1991. I would like to thank all the participants of the UQAM seminar, in particular Monique Lemieux, and all the participants of the Seoull summer school, in particular professor Dong-Whee Yang and the two other guest speakers, Kyle Johnson and Ian Roberts. Naturally, the usual disclaimers about the responsibility of the persons cited hold of the present work. Finally I would like to dedicate this article to the memory of C. L. Baker: the great respect in which I hold his work should not be masked by the disagreement I voice here with some of his views on the functional structure of English sentences.