Coordination of Verbs and Two Types of Verbal Inflection

Recent studies of the relationship between verbal morphology and syntax have led to twomajor approaches to verbal inflection in English. In one approach, proposed by Chomsky (1995), the inflectional morpheme is considered to be part of the verb that enters syntactic derivation. Thus, this approach claims that the finite verb enters syntactic derivation fully inflected and its inflectional features are licensed by a checking relation with the (abstract) functional head T. The other approach, argued for by Halle and Marantz (1993), Bobaljik (1994), and Lasnik (1995), claims that the finite verb is bare (uninflected) in syntax, with the inflectional morpheme located in T, and that the verbal root is merged with the inflectional morpheme in the phonological component (i.e., in the derivation from Spell-Out to PF) under the condition of adjacency.¹

In this squib, I will point out that the simple fact that English finite verbs can be conjoined favors the approach in which the inflectional morpheme is regarded as part of V. I will then consider Japanese in this light, showing that it does not allow finite verbs to be conjoined and that when verb coordination takes place, the first conjunct must be a bare verb. I will argue that these striking properties of Japanese arise because it employs the mechanism of verbal inflection by which the inflectional morpheme is located in T in syntax and is merged with the adjacent verb in the phonological component. The emerging picture is thus that the two types of verbal inflection are both necessary, utilized in different languages.

1 Coordination of Verbs in English and Japanese

In English, various categories can be conjoined by and. Among them are finite verbs, as illustrated in (1).

(1)

1. a. John [V read] and [V reviewed] the article.

2. b. John [V bought] and [V ate] an apple.

These examples pattern with examples involving coordination of other categories such as N(P)s and DPs, as in (2).

(2)

1. a. big [_N(P) cats] and [_N(P) dogs]

2. b. [_DP the big cats] and [_DP the small dogs]

The simple fact that finite verbs can be conjoined poses a problem for the claim that English verbs are separated from their inflectional morphemes in syntax, the latter being located in T.² Under this approach, the examples in (1) have the partial structure in (3) (I ignore vP).

(3)

In (3), V₁ and V₂ are bare verbs and the tense morpheme is in T. This structure cannot yield the surface form read and reviewed, where read and reviewed are both inflected for tense, simply because neither (past tense) read nor reviewed is a syntactic constituent. Recall that under the analysis being considered the tense morpheme, located in T in syntax, is merged with the bare verb only in the phonological component. Given the standard requirement that conjoined elements be syntactic constituents, there are no verbal heads with tense morphology that can be conjoined in syntax.

One might suggest that the surface form V and V where both Vs are inflected results from applying morphological rules in the phonological component. Such rules would have to ensure that the tense morpheme, when merged with a verb coordination, necessarily ends up on both conjuncts.

Although such a solution may worktechnically, the relevant fact receives a much simpler account under the approach in which all finite verbs in English are fully inflected when they enter syntactic derivation. Here, the cases in (1) can have the structure shown in (4).

(4)

On this view, the inflectional features of the conjoined verbs are licensed by feature checking with T, in a way parallel to checking of the Case and Φ-features of the DP conjuncts in (5).³

(5) John ate an apple and a banana.

This approach requires no additional mechanisms.

The simplest view of morphology predicts that the syntactic structure in (3), if really available, would yield a surface string in which the inflectional morpheme is attached to the conjunct to which it is adjacent, namely, V₁, and V₂ remains bare. I will claim that this is in fact...