6.1 Historical issues
Having discussed the syntactic properties of gi and go in BA and CH, it is a legiti -mate question why this particle shows up at all in these Alemannic varieties. This is particularly puzzling given that the preposition gen, from which both elements are derived, had a much wider areal distribution (cf. Deutsches Worterbuch, 5, 3342, 23). It is therefore worthwhile to have a look at motion verb construc-tions in Standard German and its predecessors. As was mentioned throughout the paper, Modern Standard German uses a bare infinitive with motion verbs.
Nevertheless, the semantic interpretation as purpose/goal and the syntactic behavior (e.g. transparency for extraction) are as in the Alemannic construction with gi/go. So we can rather safely assume that the underlying structure is basi-cally identical with the only difference that SG motion verbs directly select for a VP without the functional layer we identified for Alemannic. Looking back into the history of German, we find that the SG construction with a bare infinitive is obviously the older construction. It dates back even to Gothic. Paul ( 1920: 9Sff) provides the following examples from Gothic (SSa, Kor, 1.17) and Middle High German (SSb, Hartmann, Iwein):22
21. As a consequence, this implies that go in CH has lost some of its purpose semantics.
Bucheli & Salzmann (in prep.) provide additional arguments to that effect, for instance that go can also appear in contexts where neither motion nor purpose is involved; go is similar to an infinitival marker in such cases:
(i) S isch niid schoon, d Liiiit eso go verschrecke.
it is not nice the people thus PRT scare.INF
'It is not nice to scare people that much.' CH (Weber 1964: 307)
In this respect go seems to undergo a similar process like zum in BA which also seems to have lost its purpose meaning given that it can occur under verbs like 'forget', cf. (56) below.
22. He also notes that a bare infinitive dependent on the verb bleiben 'stay' is a much younger construction. This may explain why only some Alemannic varieties can use gilgo after non-motion verbs, recall Footnote 9.
92
(55) a. . .. insandida mik xristus daupjan sent me Christ baptize.INF ' ... Christ sent me baptize:
b. dise fuoren sehen frouwen ...
these went see.INF women 'they went to see women'
Returning to the question posed at the beginning, the data in (55) show that the purpose/goal interpretation in itself is not dependent on any type of particle but rather inherent to the combination [motion verb+ bare infinitive]. Thus, the use of gil go is clearly an Alemannic innovation; according to Lotscher (1993), the first attested appearance dates back to the 16th century. In light of (55) and the many other German dialects that do not use a particle or complementizer in motion verb constructions, the particle seems to be superfluous, in fact redundant.
But if we consider further infinitival constructions in Alemannic, we can detect a pattern into which the gi!go construction fits very well. In order to see this, we briefly have to go back to the zum-construction. Recall from above that there is an alternative to the gil go construction, namely zum-CP purpose clauses.
In BA zum has been desemanticized further to a pure left peripheral infinitival complementizer that can now be used to introduce infinitives of all types, cf.
Brandner (2006):
(56) a. I ha vergesse zum de Block zuemache.
I have.lsG forgotten to the greenhouse close.INF 'I forgot to close the greenhouse: BA b. I ha koa Ziit zum mit dir schpile.
I have.lsG no time to with you play.INF
'I have no time to play with you: BA (CH) Note that there is no infinitival marker before the non-finite verb itself, as it would be the case in SG. We can thus draw the conclusion that the pattern [left peripheral particle+ bare infinitive] is a common pattern in BA. With this in mind, the con-struction [gi + bare infinitive
1
can simply be seen as another instance of the gen-eral infinitival structure available in this language. Whether this can be attributed to a tendency towards uniformity of clause types in the sense of'analogy in syntax' will be left open here. But what we can see is that BA has the structural precondi-tions to grammaticalize preposiprecondi-tions directly to infinitival complementizers. This is different in SG where infinitives are not marked at the left edge - with the sole exception of infinitival purpose clauses with um ... zu.In the discussion above we referred to the semantic role of the gil go-phrase ambiguously as purpose/goal. This is no accident since these notions are con-ceptually quite close. In fact they overlap in the sense that 'goal' can be seen as
a subtype of 'purpose'. 'Goal' involves physical motion towards a location and is thus intimately tied to the agent of the matrix verb. 'Purpose' is more general: it need not involve a motion event and it can entail that some other referent will be affected. In the following, we will sketch very briefly how these notions can be brought together with the various syntactic realizations of motion verb comple-ments that we have seen until now.
There is one clear case, namely the spatial location of a goal, invariably realized by a PP. This goal reading was transferred to activities, realized by a bare infini-tive, cf. the data from Gothic, MHG in (55) and SG in (lb). Alemannic marks this reading overtly by grammaticalizing the rather specific directional preposition gen.
These are the cases exemplified under (la) and (10). Recall that a physical motion event is necessary for gi!go in order to be licensed, cf. the discussion around (11).
In 2.4., we showed that infinitives under motion verbs that are marked with zurn/urn ... zu are not as much semantically restricted as the motion verbs with bare infinitives (no single event reading required, no agentivity restriction) and we argued that in this case the complement is a full-fledged CP, i.e. a purpose clause.
'Genuine' modifying purpose clauses have a very different history: they were realized as finite clauses until Early New High German. Only from then on do we find infinitival purpose clauses, marked with urn ... zu, see Paul (1920: 120ff.). We even find early occurrences of urnb ... zu with motion verbs as in Steinhowel's translations of Aesop at around 1480:
(57) Esopus gieng urnb ze suchen E. went in.order to search.INF
(Steinhowel, Aesop 55, cited after Paul1920: 121) In modern German (57) would be expressed by means of a bare infinitive. This suggests that urnb ... zu was compatible with a single event reading. So it seems as if there is an overlap between goal and purpose not only in conceptual terms but also in the syntactic forms since both can be realized by means of an urn ...
zu-construction. In contemporary SG, the functions are marked differently again, goals by means of bare infinitives and purpose clauses by means of urn ... zu.
A final question remains and this is how it is possible that a verb may select for two goals at the same time, cf. cases like e.g. (44) where a spatial PP and a gi/go-phrase occur within the same clause? The answer is that this is possible if the two goals end up conceptually as one event,23 i.e. 'go to town' and 'buy books there'. In this sense, it is conceptually more like a coordination, although struc-turally, the two 'sub-goals' occur in different slots.
23. This is reminiscent of Truswell's (2008) idea of'extended event'. However, we will refrain from a detailed discussion for reasons of space.
94
6.2 The case of West Flemish
Interestingly, there is one area outside Alemannic where a similar verb doubling phenomenon can be found, viz. West Flemish (WF) (Haegeman 1990). The motional auxiliary goan obligatorily occurs after motion verbs:
(58) Me gingen vroeger atent *(goan) picknikken we went formerly always PRT picnic.INF 'We used to go to the lake on a picnic:
no den lak.
to the lake
(Haegeman 1990: 81) It seems to make the same semantic contribution as go, it is also licensed after modal verbs and even shows tripling (van Riemsdijk 2002: 182, recall Footnote 16).
It differs from go in that it only allows VR but not VPR, i.e. it always has to be adjacent to the infinitive (modulo incorporated X0-elements). For our purposes it suffices to note that the major difference is that goan is lexically marked as a prefix which the infinitive has to incorporate into.
Since as far as we can assess goan is not of prepositional origin, the presence of verb doubling in WF raises questions for the scenario proposed here. We can only speculate, but it seems that verb doubling has evolved spontaneously without the mediation of a directional preposition. The process involving the direct transition from motion verb to purpose/goal marker is in fact crosslinguistically not unheard of, it is frequently found in languages with serial verbs. Here are data from Carrib-bean English Creole (Winford 1990: 127); parallel data are found in Kouwenberg (1994: 307ff.) on Berbice Dutch.
(59) a. Yu beta go hoom go sii bau cha chi/an.
you better go home go see about your children 'You better go home to look after your children:
b. Di hosban kom in ko(m) luk biebi.
the husband came in come look baby 'The husband came in to have a look at the baby:
Intriguingly, both Winford (1990: 130) and Kouwenberg (1994: 307ff.) mention that the second occurrence of the motion verb is phonologically reduced and does not bear any TMA-marking. We intend to pursue a detailed evaluation of this option for WF in future work.24
24. A very different but particularly interesting alternative is explored in Haegeman (2009) where verb doubling is linked to language contact, i.e. the influence of French with its rich use of functional aller'go: Unfortunately, we have no evidence in favor or against this proposal (for either WF or CH) and therefore have to leave discussion of it for future research.
7· Conclusion
In this paper we have compared motion verb constructions in two Alemannic varieties, namely in Bodensee-Alemannic and Swiss German, where a special par-ticle introduces the infinitival complement that depends on the motion verb. At first sight the two varieties only seem to differ with respect to the form of the par-ticle. Upon closer inspection, however, a number of striking asymmetries emerge.
We have shown that the asymmetries can be reduced to the categorial status of the particle in the two varieties. It was originally a preposition and has developed into a purpose/goal marker in Bodensee-Alemannic. In Swiss German, however, the purpose/goal marker has been reanalyzed as a verbal element and has been integrated into the Verb Raising/Verb Projection Raising system.
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