Considering Well, Accurately, Completely: Lithuanian Lexical Verb Placement on the Syntactic Tree

Abstract

The present article is concerned with the position of the Lithuanian lexical verb on the syntactic tree.As is known, Pollock (1989) postulates the verb raising parameter and examines the differences between a verb raising language like French and a verb non-raising language like English using the position of low adverbs relative to the lexical verb as a criterion. Adverb placement since then has come to be regarded as a powerful diagnostic tool. In addition, by exploring the relation between manner adverbs and stative and eventive verbs, Katz (2003) elaborates on the structure of the syntactic tree immediately above the verb phrase vP/VP and posits the Aspectual Phrase (AspP) as immediately dominating the vP/VP of eventive verbs.The present article examines the verb raising parameter in light of the distributional behaviour of threemanner adverbs: gerai, tvarkingai and visiškai and posits two objectives: to find additional support for the low placement of the Lithuanian lexical verb on the syntactic tree and to examine the area immediately above the verb phrase vP/VP. It is argued that native Lithuanian prefixes are to be regarded as the lexically manifest head of the aspectual phrase AspP which is positioned above the verb phrase.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.26.12420