Dislocaciones verbales en estructuras de polaridad

Abstract

Negative clauses in Basque display a pattern of verb displacement, whereby the inflected verbal form appears to the left of its complements, contrasting with the canonical position to their right. This displacement is found in main and some embedded clauses, but it is absent from other subordinate contexts, usually those marked by the complementizer -(e)n. The article claims this movement pattern is not restricted to negative clauses, but can befound in other 'polarity' contexts such as yes/no questions and positive emphatic clauses (similar to emphatic clauses with do in English). Some yes/no questions are formed by movement of the verb to the left, similar to the 'inversion' phenomenon found in other languages. Such inversion, however, is absent in embedded questions, introduced by the complementizer -(e)n. As for emphatic positive clauses, the article shows that they also involve verb movement to the left, accompanied in specific cases by the appearence of the 'emphatic' particle ba. It is shown that subordination contexts from which ba is traditionally claimed to be excluded correspond to contexts where negative displacement may not take place. All these patterns, and their absence in some embedded clauses, can be related if we assume that all three 'polarity structures' share a movement of the head INFL to the left.