Word order and syntactic asymmetries in Basque modal constructions

Ricardo Etxepare Igiñitz; Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria

doi:10.35462/FLV126.5

Ricardo Etxepare Igiñitz Iker UMR 5478-CNRS [France]
Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) [Spain]

Keywords: modal predicates, need/have to, word order alternations, person vs. number agreement, Basque

Abstract

This work focuses on a subset of modal constructions in Basque: those involving the necessity modal behar (‘need/must’/‘have to’). Behar can take either a DP or an uninflected clause as its complement. Uninflected clauses can, in some varieties of Basque, naturally occur preceding or following the predicate. Etxepare and Uribe-Etxebarria (2009) show that the differences in word order correlate with a number of intriguing syntactic asymmetries. In this paper, we extend the relevant observations to include modal stacking, as well as the effect of complement-internal left peripheral elements in the availability of agreement with the matrix auxiliary, which we show to be different for Person and Number agreement.

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