Decomposing the left periphery : dialectal and cross-linguistic evidence

I will argue in this paper that the left periphery of the clause is morphosyntactically more articulate than usually revealed by its surface form, and that this form strongly resembles the surface form of languages which lack a left-peripheral encoding of the relevant features altogether. Important clues in favor of this connection are provided by dialects which show forms of so-called doubly filled COMP or forms of so-called CP-recursion. It will also be argued that the syntactic architecture of such varieties is supported by independent proposals about the semantics of questions. I will finally present evidence that verb-movement to the C-position (‘I-to-C movement’) is a core trigger for the activation of force features. The article is organized as follows: Section 1 presents the elementary clausal architecture. Section 2 provides data which show that the C-position is more complex than certain standard languages reveal phonetically. Sections 3 and 4 turn to a consideration of East-Asian (Japanese and Korean) and Dutch dialectal data, respectively. Sections 5 and 6 bring into the discussion the semantics of disjunctive questions and constituent questions. Section 7 contains a preliminary synthesis. Section 8 turns to verb-first (V1) and verb-second (V2) clauses in German, showing in which way the structures looked at thus far are transformed into utterances with illocutionary force. 1. Elementary clausal architecture According to recent syntactic theorizing, clauses are organized in roughly three layers. The lowest one is the lexical projection normally headed by V. Next, there is the inflectional layer headed by I. On top of this, there is a