The Role of Predication in the Syntactic Licensing of Purposive Adjuncts
Manuel Espanol-Echevarria University of California, Los Angeles mespanol@ucla.edu
In this paper, I argue that predication is crucially involved in the syntactic licensing of purposive clausal adjuncts. I review the typology of purposive clausal adjuncts in English (cf. Faraci (1974), Browning (1985), Jones (1991)), and show the problems that an adequate characterization of such typology poses for a syntactic treatment of purposive clauses in terms of adjunction, or as VP-internal complements. The later approach, in particular, faces the problem of deriving the fact that different types of purposive clauses have different scope possibilities with respect to matrix clause operators, such as negation.
I argue that all purposive clauses are licensed VP-internally, and selected by a CAUS(ative) head present in all agentive VP's. The different scope possibilities are due to syntactic movement, and predication plays a crucial role in motivating the movement. Certain verbs (e.g., transitive verbs of exchange, such as buy) can license purpose clause (i.e., "low" purposive adjuncts) because they provide a VP-internal configuration that can serve as subject of the predication introduced by the purposive clause (cf. Hale and Keyser (1993) VP-decomposition). Whenever such a VP-shell is not available and the predication introduced by the purposive clause cannot be licensed inside VP (i.e. in the case of a verb like hit), the only way of licensing the purposive clause is through the introduction of a purpose operator external to VP (e.g. in order in English). This operator attracts (cf. Chomsky (1995)) both the matrix IP, as well as the purposive clause; and the "high" scope effects associated with in-order-to clauses (i.e., rationale clauses) are a by-product of the resultant configuration.
