Variation in auxiliary to T movement: evidence from adverbs

Abstract

Adverb positions have been used to assess whether or not a language undergoes verb movement [e.g. Pollock, Jean-Yves. 1989. Verb movement, universal grammar, and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20(3), 365–424; Roberts, Ian. 1993. Verbs and diachronic syntax. A comparative history of English and French. Dordrecht: Kluwer.; Ayoun, Dalila. 2005. Verb movement phenomena in Spanish: “mixed languages” and bilingualism. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press]. These adverbs are argued to be base-generated in the specifier positions of specific phrases; therefore, any word order variation is due to verbal head movement [e.g. Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; Alexiadou, Artemis. 1997. Adverb placement: A case study in asymmetric syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins]. In earlier stages of English, all verbs moved to a higher position, namely tense (T); however, in present English, only auxiliary verbs are still capable of moving to T. This shift in movement constraints is attributed to a loss in agreement features on main verbs, whereas the English auxiliaries are morphologically richer and still exhibit movement. This paper analyzes the interaction of TP adverbs and auxiliaries in spoken corpus data in order to provide empirical evidence to support the claim that English speakers prefer auxiliary movement to T. It finds auxiliary movement occurs but there is a variation between auxiliary have and be. Auxiliary have moves less frequently above higher adverb probably than it does above lower adverb always, whereas auxiliary be consistently moves to T regardless of adverb. The hypothesis is that movement varies because auxiliary have is less morphologically rich in comparison to auxiliary be.

Keywords:

• auxiliaries
• movement
• adverbs
• word order
• morphology

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the four native English speaker informants Nick, Steven, Katie, and Dana for agreeing to take the intuition test and for providing honest comments on their selections. Portions of the research in this paper evolved from my Master's thesis. Thus, I would like to thank my defense committee members, Elly van Gelderen, Mariana Bahtchevanova, and Johanna Wood, for their guidance as I transitioned into writing this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.