Clitic auxiliaries and incorporation

Abstract

This paper discusses the two alternating syntactic patterns of Polish past and conditional sentences from a Slavic perspective. We argue that what are often referred to in Polish as past tense verbs, for examplewidzialeś ‘you saw’, are in fact combinations of a past participle and a perfect auxiliary, e.g.,widział ‘seen’ andś ‘you have’. These combinations are the result of syntactic Incorporation in the sense of Baker (1988). When not combined with the participle, the auxiliary can appear almost anywhere to the left of the participle within the same clause. We argue, however, that it always occupies the same syntactic position, only to undergo PF-cliticization. The auxiliary combines with a variety of elements because phrasal frontings such asWh-movement and Scrambling allow a variety of categories to immediately precede the I-node occupied by the auxiliary. The proposal that the auxiliary appears in the I-node alone or incorporates the participle explains why certain items can host a clitic auxiliary while others cannot. A second auxiliary that incorporates a participle is the conditional auxiliary, as inwidział + byś ‘you would see’. However, the conditional auxiliary is not a clitic and hence, unlike the perfect auxiliary, can appear in initial position. We argue that Polish is unique among West and South Slavic languages in having Incorporation. Bulgarian sentences likečel sŭm ‘I have read’ and counterparts in Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovak appear similar to Polish examples involving Incorporation. However, they are the product of Long Head Movement, i.e., the movement of the participle directly to the C-position across the auxiliary. We argue that Polish sentences involving Incorporation differ in syntactic properties from Long Head Movement constructions in the other languages.