Word order and syntactic asymmetries in Basque modal constructions

Abstract

This work focuses on a subset of modal constructions in Basque: those involving the necessity modal behar (‘need/must’/‘have to’). Behar can take either a DP or an unin- flected clause as its complement. Uninflected clauses can, in some varieties of Basque, naturally occur preceding or following the predicate. Etxepare and Uribe-Etxebarria (2009) show that the differences in word order correlate with a number of intriguing syntactic asymmetries. In this paper, we extend the relevant observations to include modal stacking, as well as the effect of complement-internal left peripheral elements in the availability of agreement with the matrix auxiliary, which we show to be different for Person and Number agreement.

Keywords

• modal predicates
• need/have to
• word order alternations
• person vs. number agreement
• Basque