WernerAbraham.PDFVIP

Werner Abraham 19-11-99 Groningen, abraham@ let rug nl Abraham MV-Syntax wpd On the syntax and semantics of modal verbs in German Der Kollege versteht von der Sache nicht viel und macht ausgiebig Gebrauch davon (gemurmelter Kommentar eines Nachbarn bei einer IdS-Tagung) Zu den Modalverben fehlt eine Menge an Literaturhinweisen, darunter die Habilschnft von T F, die noch nicht ver?ffentlicht ist (Kritik eines Fachzeitschriftenherausgebers zu einem eingesandten Artikel) 1. Introduction: Whats different between English and German modal verbs? a lot! The traditional view of the difference between modal verbs (MVs) in English and in German is that, since English cannot project non-finite forms, English MVs project into the syntactic In? flection) category, while German projects into V. See (4) below (1995: 469 ff; Sprouse/Durbin 1997; see in particular Abrahaml998 for the difference between English and German). Recall that mam verbs in English, modals as well as finite Auxs such as have and be, surface in V. (1) displays the s-structure of both English and German. One assumes standardly that English modals are base-generated in I (although this is contested, on a typological comparative basis, by Rohrbacher 1998) 1 IP MV VEnglish ? German Aux | | V V/MV/Aux The English modal verb (MV) is represented under I, whereas the MV in German has the syntactic status of a full lexical, V. However, this is not the whole story about the German MV since its root, or deontic (DMV), reading and its epistemic reading (EMV) must be distinguished. In (4) below, the syntactic distinguishing characteristics are listed (2) ENGLISH GERMAN a s/he can(*s), may(*s), must(*s) etc INFLEXION ihr k