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    Nonveridicality as a condition on verbless infinitival clauses
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    Verbless non-finite complements seem to be subject to a semantic requirement: the truth of the complement may not be presupposed by the element selecting it, or, put differently, the complement must not be veridical.

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    The absence of the light verb seems to be related to the presence of a restricted set of elements which share the property that they are nonveridical with respect to their complement. A non-veridical function has the property that it does not entail the truth of its argument. A deontic modal characteristically does not entail anything about the truth of its complement. So John wanted to jump does not entail John jumped. An epistemic modal, on the other hand, entails that the truth of its complement is probable, and so an epistemic modal is not neutral with respect to the truth of its complement. All the complements involving an empty verb occur in nonveridical semantic structures due to the presence of deontic modal verbs or the infinitival complementiser om for. Conversely, it does not seem to be the case that failure of verb ellipsis entails the presence of a veridical structure. Ellipsis is idiomatically related to a set of lexical triggers (deontic modals, the complementiser for). These triggers all share the property that they are nonveridical, but it is not the case that all nonveridical elements license verb ellipsis.

    Conversely, there are also clauses introduced by the complementiser om for, so that they fullfill the lexical condition on verbless complements, but which are veridical, so failing the semantic condition on verbless complements, consider the constructions in (1):

    Example 1

    a. *It slagge Jouke om nei Grins ta
    it succeeded Jouke for to Grins to
    Jouke succeeded in going to Grins
    b. *Jouke holp Jildou om nei Grins ta
    Jouke helped Jildou for to Grins to
    Jouke helped Jildou to go to Grins
    c. *Afke twong Piter om nei Grins ta
    Afke forced Piter for to Grins to
    Afke forced Piter to go to Grins
    d. *Afke beprate Piter om nei Grins ta
    Afke talked.over Piter for to Grins to
    Afke persuaded Piter to go to Grins

    These verbs entail or presuppose the truth of their complements. Being veridical, they fail to meet the semantic condition for verbless clauses. The clauses above become grammatical if the to-infinitive of a verb of motion is added to them.

    Anti-veridical verbs meet the semantic condition for verbless clauses, since they do not entail the truth of the complement, more specifically, they entail or presuppose that the proposition represented by the complement is false. Correspondingly, the following examples are grammatical, which involve verbless clausal complements to antiveridical verbs:

    Example 2

    a. Ik ferpof it om nei Grins ta
    I refuse it for to Grins to
    I refuse going to Grins
    b. Afke wjerhold Piter derfan om nei Grins ta
    Afke kept Piter of.it for to Grins to
    Afke kept Piter from going to Grins
    c. It wie Doutzen finaal troch it sin gongen om nei Grins ta
    it was Doutzen completely through the mind gone for to Grins to
    Doutzen had completely forgotten about going to Grins
    d. Doutzen wie te tûk om nei Grins ta
    Doutzen was too smart for to Grins to
    Doutzen was too smart to go to Grins

    Nonveridicality or a similar concept seems to be relevant for a proper understanding of the conditions on the occurrence of verbless infinitival clauses.

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      ABOUT THIS TOPIC
      Author(s):
      Eric Hoekstra
      Category:
      Frisian Syntax
      Publication date:
      14 May 2020
      Keywords:
      verblessnonveridical
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