Heidi Harley, Rolf Noyer
in Proceedings of NELS 28, Kiyomi Kusumoto and Pius Tamanji, eds., 143-157. University of Massachusetts at Amherst:GLSA
Publication year: 1998

The ongoing debate concerning overt object shift and verb movement in languages such as Icelandic has largely overlooked a body of literature arguing for overt verb movement and object shift of a clearly different type in English (Pesetsky 1991, Johnson 1991, Koizumi 1993). We will show that the nominalizations of verb-particle constructions provide a final confirmation of the overt object-shift analysis of English accusative objects, and require a split-VP architecture as proposed in the above literature and later work (Travis 1988, Kratzer 1993, Chomsky 1995). The analysis we present depends upon a non-lexicalist approach to the formation of nominal and verbal forms from category-neutral roots, which we frame in terms of the Distributed Morphology framework of Halle and Marantz 1994.