Abstract
This paper puts forth a hypothesis on the nature of the transition from VSO word order to SVO word order and, more specifically, on the status of grammars which are in a state of transition. I argue that among such grammars one expects to find one in which [SPEC,IP] is never a so-called A-position and in which syntactic verb movement to I is optional and that Modern Hebrew is an example of such a language. The first part of the paper is dedicated to evidence in favor of the optional nature of verb movement, while the second part explores the properties of [SPEC,IP] and the consequences which its non-A-status has for quantification, movement and word order.
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Various versions of this paper were presented in the UQAM workshop on Hebrew Syntax, Fall 1990; at MIT; SOAS; McGill; UConn and Bar-Ilan University. Parts of this material have been taught in a graduate seminar at UMass. I am grateful to these audiences for useful comments. Special thanks go to Kyle Johnson, Ur Shlonsky, Rejean Canac-Marquis, Edit Doron, Ilan Hazout, David Pesetsky, Lisa Travis and three anonymous NLLT reviewers.
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Borer, H. The ups and downs of Hebrew verb movement. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 13, 527–606 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00992740
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00992740