Verb-raising in Slavic conditionals
David Willis

One noteworthy feature of the diachronic development of Slavic
morphosyntax has been the independent loss in a number of Slavic
varieties (East Slavic, Slovak, Lower Sorbian, Slovene, and to some
extent in Serbian) of subject-auxiliary agreement in the conditional and
the innovation of an uninflected conditional mood Îparticleâ. Parallel
developments do not appear to have taken place in other language groups
with an inherited periphrastic conditional. This paper addresses the
question of why Slavic should be such fertile territory for such a
development. Evidence is presented from three varieties of Slavic that
retain the inflected conditional auxiliary, namely Old Russian, Old
Church Slavic and Modern Bulgarian, for word order asymmetries between
the conditional and the indicative periphrastic tenses. For instance, in
Bulgarian, object pronouns may be enclitic either to the pluperfect
auxiliary or to the lexical verb, (1), whereas in the conditional
periphrasis they must be enclitic to the lexical verb, (2).

(1)     Az      bjax    mu      go                      dal.
        Az                      mu      go      bjax    dal.
        I       (had)   him     it      (had)   given
        ÎI had given it to him.â

(2)     Az      bix             mu      go                      dal.
        *Az                     mu      go      bix             dal.
        I       (would) him     it      (would) given
        ÎI would give it to him.â

This is analyzed as evidence that the conditional auxiliary undergoes
movement from IP to the head of a mood projection, MP, assuming
subsequent movement of pronominal clitics from canonical object
positions to left-adjoin to I. Given the postulation of a mood
projection, it is natural within a minimalist framework to suppose that
languages may vary with respect to the strength of the I-feature of this
head. The discovery that I-to-M movement is overt in Bulgarian, but
covert in such languages as English, is therefore welcome from a
theoretical perspective. Parallel arguments from clitic placement in Old
Russian, and from negation in Old Church Slavic, confirm this as a valid
possibility. The presence of I-to-M movement in three Slavic varieties
with conservative conditional constructions naturally makes positing
such movement for the Slavic parent language a plausible approach. In
the final part of the paper, the diachronic consequences of this
analysis are considered, with the loss of subject-auxiliary agreement in
Russian being taken as a case study. I argue that there may have been
little evidence for overt movement from I-to-M during the process of
language acquisition. This acquisitional difficulty could lead to the
morphological separation of mood and agreement. Instead the checking
requirements of M were satisfied by overt insertion of the invariant
conditional Îparticleâ, and covert raising of agreement features.
 
 

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