[To appear in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, Proceedings of the 29th Penn Linguistics Colloquium] On Egin: Do-Support And Verb Focalization1 In Central And Western Basque

Central and Western Basque (CWB) dialects have a verb focalization construction involving the dummy verb egin, which as a lexical verb is akin to English ‘make ’ or ‘do. ’ (Rebuschi 1984, Ortiz de Urbina 1989, Zuazo 1998, Etxepare and Ortiz de Urbina 2003). An example of this construction is given in (1), which Ortiz de Urbina (1989) gives as a felicitous answer to the question, “What happened to your father?” (1) Hil egin da gure aita. die do AUX our father ‘Our father has DIED.’ The goal of this paper is to explain how do-support comes about in sentences of this kind. In particular, this paper argues that Central and Western Basque dialects, along with Korean, form a class of do-support languages whose dummy verb insertion mechanism differs slightly from that in English (Chomsky 1995, Pollock 1989) and Monnese (Benincà and Poletto 2004). In all four of these languages, the dummy verb is merged as a last resort strategy to check a strong feature in a position that is, in marked environments, inaccessible to the verb. However, in Korean and CWB, unlike in English and Monnese, the verb’s inability to raise is not due to its theta-marking properties or to its inflectional poverty, but rather because the VP must be nominalized—i.e. appear with nominal infinitival morphology—for independent reasons; this nominal infinitive may not bear verbal aspectual features, an