Verb raising in American Sign Language
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Detalles
I propose a unified account for these three ASL constructions and consider its theoretical implications for the theory of verbal morphology. I extend the idea of the Movement Analy- sis of Verb Sandwich, proposed in Fischer and Janis (1992). Based on the Minimalist approach proposed in Chomsky (1995), I argue that the derivations of all three sentence pat- terns involve overt verb raising to Infl. The verb movement to Infl occurs to save the other- wise stranded [asp] affix, even though the verb itself does not have motivation to raise overtly. Hence, this verb raising is a syntactic operation driven by Enlightened Self Interest (Lasnik, 1995a,b). In our discussion, it is shown that Chomsky's (1995) Checking Theory faces empirical problems in accounting for the ASL phenomena in question. I will present an alternative analysis, which is crucially based on a proposal of Lasnik (1995c) that regular verbs are selected from the lexicon uninflected. The Object Raising is analyzed as an instance of Holmberg's generalization (Branigan, 1992), which states that overt object shift is possible only when the verb is overtly raised out of VP.