Syntactic restrictions on infinitival imperatives in Czech

Ivona Kučerová

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Syntactic restrictions on infinitival imperatives in Czech

A B S T R A C T
This paper discusses syntactic restrictions on infinitival imperatives in Czech. I argue that for an infinitival imperative to be well-formed, there must be syntactic material asymmetrically c-commanding V in the phase (cyclic domain) of the imperative. I compare this restriction to other cross-linguistic restrictions on roots: in particular, I show that the behavior of Czech infinitival imperatives is parallel to restrictions on middle constructions in English. In particular, I argue that for the English middle constructions to be well-formed, there must be syntactic material asymmetrically c-commanding v. Finally, I discuss Czech infinitival imperatives in the context of Surrogate Negative Imperative languages. I argue that the differences between Surrogate Negative Imperative languages, i.e. languages that ban negative inflected imperatives, and Czech follow from morpho-syntactic differences in negation in this class of languages and Czech.

Key words: negative imperatives, well-formedness of syntactic structure, middles, Czech, English

Daný článek je on-line k dispozici v databázi CEEOL.

Linguistics & Languages, Togo Salmon Hall 608, McMaster University
1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4M2
ivona@alum.mit.edu

Slovo a slovesnost, volume 70 (2009), number 4, pp. 305-313

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