Microvariation in verbal <i>rather</i>. Wood, J. Linguistic Variation, March, 2024. ![Microvariation in verbal <i>rather</i> [link]](https://bibbase.org/img/filetypes/link.svg "link")
Paper doi abstract bibtex Abstract This paper uses survey results to analyze patterns of judgments across different versions of the non-standard verbal use of the word rather , which can take participial morphology, as in rathered . Across numerous possible instantiations of the construction, there appear to be in fact a quite limited number of grammars, which are generated by an implicational hierarchy of functional heads, along with the availability of a silent verb have . The overall picture supports several broader conclusions. First, bare-infinitive–selecting verbs are nearly “closed class” because they have special syntactic properties that go beyond semantic or even syntactic selection: they must value the temporal verbal features of the embedded verb, or else provide a structural context for such valuation. Second, silent verbs can be licensed by head-moving to a modal head in the extended projection. This movement is freely available, but silence demands recoverability, which limits its application only to certain verbs, and certain uses/meanings of those verbs. Third, in addition to previously known configurations for building parasitic participle constructions, movement of a lower verb to a higher verb can extend the phase of the lower verb and lead to its silence. Fourth, the distribution of rather suggests that volitional meaning is not a primitive, but is constructed from smaller primitives. Finally, microvariation reveals a tight connection among logically distinct functional heads, suggesting that they are not acquired independently of each other, but interact in significant ways.
@article{wood_microvariation_2024,
title = {Microvariation in verbal \textit{rather}},
copyright = {https://benjamins.com/content/customers/rights},
issn = {2211-6834, 2211-6842},
url = {http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/lv.22026.woo},
doi = {10.1075/lv.22026.woo},
abstract = {Abstract
This paper uses survey results to analyze patterns of judgments across different versions of the non-standard
verbal use of the word
rather
, which can take participial morphology, as in
rathered
. Across
numerous possible instantiations of the construction, there appear to be in fact a quite limited number of grammars, which are
generated by an implicational hierarchy of functional heads, along with the availability of a silent verb
have
. The
overall picture supports several broader conclusions. First, bare-infinitive–selecting verbs are nearly “closed class” because
they have special syntactic properties that go beyond semantic or even syntactic selection: they must value the temporal verbal
features of the embedded verb, or else provide a structural context for such valuation. Second, silent verbs can be licensed by
head-moving to a modal head in the extended projection. This movement is freely available, but silence demands recoverability,
which limits its application only to certain verbs, and certain uses/meanings of those verbs. Third, in addition to previously
known configurations for building parasitic participle constructions, movement of a lower verb to a higher verb can extend the
phase of the lower verb and lead to its silence. Fourth, the distribution of
rather
suggests that volitional
meaning is not a primitive, but is constructed from smaller primitives. Finally, microvariation reveals a tight connection among
logically distinct functional heads, suggesting that they are not acquired independently of each other, but interact in
significant ways.},
language = {en},
urldate = {2024-07-19},
journal = {Linguistic Variation},
author = {Wood, Jim},
month = mar,
year = {2024},
}
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