Two types of restructuring-Lexical vs. functional [An article from: Lingua]

This digital document is a journal article from Lingua, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
This paper presents and discusses criteria for distinguishing between lexical and functional heads in the clausal domain, with special focus on restructuring configurations (a.k.a. reanalysis, clause union, coherence). Using these criteria, I show that even under the narrowest understanding of the term restructuring, German has both functional and lexical restructuring verbs. This proposal contrasts with the view recently advanced by Cinque on the basis of Italian under which all restructuring verbs are functional (as opposed to lexical) heads residing within a highly articulated IP. The two approaches are compared, and it is shown that a universalist interpretation of Cinque's position is untenable.