Abstracts Motivations for Final Position and for Enclitic Position: on the Placing of the Inflected Verb in Historical Basque

Motivations for final position and for enclitic position: On the placing of the inflected verb in historical Basque Modern Basque (and historical Basque as a whole; generalized attestations start in the 16 century) is a XXIV-type language in Greenberg’s (1966) classification; that is, a non-rigid SOV language with Gen-N order and postpositions, but with N-Adj order. In the present work, I examine the position of the inflected verb in the simplex clauses of historical Basque, from the perspective of the motivations that may play a role in it. Probably the most important generalization here is that, in the historical period, the simplex clause of Basque has always had a rather free word order. However, two major motivations show up which seem to account for a competition in the position of the inflected verb. On the one hand, there is a motivation for placing the inflected verb in final position (or at least after all the major constituents of the clause). On the other hand, there is another motivation which tends to place the inflected verb enclitic to a focal host. These two major motivations are not always in conflict: the focal host can appear in second-to-last position, thus fulfilling both motivations at the same time. Only when the focal host that attracts the inflected verb appears in an early position (particularly in initial position) do we have a competition between motivations. This is especially clear in negative clauses and wh-questions. In these two cases, at least, the historical trend of Basque evolves towards promoting (i.e. ranking higher) the incentive for placing the inflected verb enclitic to an early focal host (e.g. negative particle, wh-word), in detriment of placing the verb in final position. This implies a trend from V-final position towards a non-final position of the inflected verb, (at least in negative clauses and wh-questions): see examples (1)-(4). Nevertheless, each of negative clauses and wh-questions has its own peculiarities regarding word order. This is particularly true of clauses with periphrastic verbs consisting of a main non-inflected verb and an inflected auxiliary. (This type of verb is, incidentally, the most frequent in historical Basque.) Thus, the evolutions of negative clauses and wh-questions have not been absolutely parallel. In negative clauses, the enclisis of the inflected verb to the negative particle is constant in all periods of historical Basque. Therefore, a major change in the position of the synthetic verb is not appreciable (compare, nevertheless, (1a) and (1b) below). What is noticeable is the evolution towards an earlier position of the negative clitic-complex (i.e. negative particle + inflected auxiliary) in periphrastic verbs, exemplified in (2) below. On the other hand, in wh-questions, the evolution has been towards the enclisis of the whole verbal complex (i.e. either inflected synthetic verb, or main verb + inflected auxiliary) to the wh-word, exemplified in (3) and (4) below, respectively. In any event, these changes should not be understood as a clear-cut evolution from an SOV language towards an SVO language (or towards a less V-final language), because affirmative declarative clauses and subordinate clauses are not involved in this trend, and moreover because quite free word order has always been paramount in the historical period of Basque as a whole. Gontzal Aldai