An unexpected root clause
Dag Haug, Marius Jøhndal, Per Erik Solberg
April 2018 

In this squib we provide evidence that the Latin infinitival structure known as "accusative and infinitive" (AcI), which has properties that are typical of canonical non-finite clauses, can be syntactically unembedded. When this happens the AcI is not anchored to the actual utterance, but is interpreted as a reported utterance, semantically embedded under a report predicate. The report predicate does not syntactically govern the AcI and may only be present in the wider discourse context, or even only be inferable from it.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003359 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	accepted as squib in Linguistic Inquiry
keywords:	latin, indirect discourse, root clauses, finiteness, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [October 2017] v1 [March 2017]
Downloaded:	1215 times

 

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