Speaker: Magdalena Lohninger (University of Salzburg)
Title: Form of a CP, meaning of a vP: Event complements in Austrian German
Time: Tuesday, September 29, 1:00pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
The talk investigates clausal complementation in Austrian German, focusing specifically on complement clauses under verbs like “try, begin, finish”. While such verbs select only infinitival complements in Standard German, they can take full CPs in Austrian German, giving rise to sentences such as (1):
1) (1) Er hat versucht/angfangen/aufghört [ dass er des Auto repariert ]
He has tried/started/finished [ that he the car repair.3sg ]
He tried/started/finished to repair the car
Even though such complement clauses surface as full CPs, they are highly restricted in their interpretation: they exhibit obligatory control, their time-reference must be identical to the matrix time, they cannot express any other morphological tense value than present tense, they can receive an implicative reading under verbs like “forget”, and do not permit embedded V2 or interrogatives. Hence, their interpretation resembles an infinitive (or what Wurmbrand and Lohninger 2019 term an “Event” clause), rather than what we expect from a CP. Interestingly, these “fake” CPs freely alternate with genuine infinitival complements, raising a puzzle concerning the relationship between semantic selection and syntactic size.
Given that this is very recent work, I will focus primarily on the empirical findings, and hope to get some feedback on how to develop the more theoretical aspects.