Chapter 6
Inflectional Phrases
In the previous chapter we detailed the structure of the central part of the clause, the
VP and its extensions into light verb and aspectual morpheme structures. In this
chapter we will look at the further extension of the structure so far built into what we
can conceive of as ‘clause structure’, though as we shall see, what is traditionally
thought of as a clause is actually a number of hierarchically organised extensions of
the basic VP, each of which adds a specific level of semantic and grammatical
interpretation. In connection with these extra levels we will see there are specific
syntactic phenomena, most of which involves the movement of elements.
In chapter 1 we introduced the category of inflection, consisting of modal auxiliaries,
the marker of the infinitival clause to and tense morphemes. It is with this category
that we will be concerned in the present chapter. We will show that providing a
standard X-bar treatment of this element solves a number of problems that we have
noted in previous chapters.
1 The structure of IP
Inflectional elements are word level categories such as will, can, may, must, etc. as
well as to, -ed (and its numerous irregular manifestations) and -s. In chapter 1 we
argued that these all belong to one category, ‘Inflection’ (I) because of their
complementary distribution:
(1) a Mike might will see the doctor
b Bill will to go to work
c *Cathy can watches TV.
In all of the sentences in (1) there are two inflectional elements and each time this
produces an ungrammaticality. Therefore not only can we conclude that each of these
elements belongs to the same category, but that there is only one position for this
category in each clause.
We also suggested in chapter 1 that inflectional elements take verbal complements
on the observation that they are always followed by a VP (or perhaps a vP, depending
on the properties of the verb). From an X-bar point of view, this suggests that
inflections are to be treated as heads as only a head takes a complement. If this is right,
then we predict that there will be a phrase that the inflection heads; an IP:
(2) IP
I'
I VP