Negation and Infinitives: att inte vara or að vera ekki.
Ken Ramshøj Christensen, Department of English, Aarhus Universitet

Grammatik i Fokus [Grammar in Focus], Lund University, Sweden, February 6, 2004.

Abstract:
The Scandinavian languages and English show interesting distributional differences in infinitival clauses. Some of them allow the so-called split infinitive, others do not – depending on the type of adverbial, i.e. VP- or sentential adverbial/negation.

I will present a new analysis of the structure of infinitives, more specifically the position of the infinitive marker – its base-position and possible Spell-Out positions. It will be argued that the former is universally fixed as the head of a functional projection within the VP-domain dominating vP, while the latter is subject to parametric variation. For example, Swedish has obligatory movement to Iº (= AgrSº), while Norwegian has optional movement to both Tº and Iº. Such an analysis is, as far as I know, different from what is standardly assumed.

It will be shown that Icelandic has movement to Iº in control infinitives and I argue that this movement is driven by the presence of the infinitival marker að. It is not the verb itself that checks the f features on Iº, it’s the infinitive marker to which the infinitive verb is incorporated – an operation which seems to correlate with the availability of finite Vº-to-Iº movement.

This analysis has important implications for the analysis of non-control infinitives such as ECM constructions. In particular, I present new data from Icelandic to support my analysis, which shows that negation in fact can be used as an indicator for the lack of movement ECM constructions, contrary to what is generally assumed.