--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
> Unfortunately, I am not acquainted with the concept of an 'INFL'
> node. Where can I find a detailed enough summary of the phase
> structure analysis you are using?
>
> To me it just seems natural to consider the whole verb rather than
> particular parts of it. One gets quite a range of behaviours - in
> English, markings (number, person, present/past) appear on the
> auxiliary, but in other languages the markings may be on the main
> verb while the auxiliary is itself optional. (The auxiliary has
> vanished in the Russian past tense.) There's nothing peculiar
about
> the perfect in this regard. Sometimes the markings are formally
> separate words, and it simplifies matters if one can refer to the
> whole, possibly discontiguous, set as the verb. Also, it
simplifies
> matters if fusion is incomplete, e.g. the Portuguese future, which
> famously incorporates pronominal objects.
>
> Richard.
Maybe you may refer to some rmore ecent textbooks on minimalist
programs or Principles and Parameters by Noam Chomsky, or other books
by the Chomskyians.
In the framework, a sentence, like any phrase, has the structure of
specifier, head, and complement. In a sentence, the specifier is
taken by the subject, the head is either overly occupied by
auxiliaries or covertly by tense/agreement features. Within a
sentence, we also have the VP complement, where the head is the verb
and the complement may be an NP or PP.
In the cases where the idea of perfect construction is manifested in
a single verb, there is no problem with the implicational universal.
However, in that particular stage of Old English, the perfect
construction is expressed by two lexical items. If we treat the
auxiliary-subject agreement and verb-object agreement separately on
the basis of auxiliaries and verbs belonging to different
constituents, we may claim the auxiliary and the verb are not a whole
(however,we may claim the auxiliary and the Verb phrase(VP) itself
constitute a unit called I-bar) and the OE sentence violates the
universal.
Ray