Josef Bayer

Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles

Abstract: In this chapter, it will be shown that in the grammar of German,
discourse as well as focus particles are part of the functional structure of the
clause, and that in the unmarked case both types of particles take scope exactly
where they are merged. Their scope must not be changed in the ongoing deriva-
tion. In other words, they are “frozen in place”. A challenge comes from those
cases in which particles form constituents with sub-sentential phrases such as
my bike or in which village, i.e. phrases which do not qualify as scope domains.
While co-constituency with sub-sentential phrases is a widely known property of
focus particles, corresponding constellations with discourse particles are less
widely known and therefore more challenging. Due to this, the focus of the
chapter will be on discourse particles. In part 1, I will present what I take to be
the current base-line of a syntactic-semantic representation of discourse particles
(in German and hopefully beyond). Part 2 develops an account of discourse
particles in wh-questions and their dependence on interrogative force. Part 3
shows how discourse particles can directly combine with wh-phrases, and how
the movement of phrases that are composed in such a way and their scope
properties can be integrated into the account developed in part 2. Importantly,
I will show that their scope freezes in a position lower than the position seen in
surface structure. This finding defines the goal of our consideration of focus
particles. Part 4 integrates focus particles and shows that the analysis gets
close to a unified account of focus particles and discourse particles. The perspec-
tive and advantage of a unified theory of particles is commented on in section 5.
Section 6 draws some conclusions.

Keywords: discourse particle, focus particle, scope, criterial freezing , agreement,

illocutionary force, clause type (CT), speech act (SA), question, copy movement

1 Discourse particles in situ

Discourse particles (DiPs, in German known as Modalpartikeln or Abtönung-
spartikeln) make a rather clear semantic contribution to the meaning of a
sentence. 1.1 provides an informal semantics of particles that play a role in
wh-questions. This is followed by a brief introduction to the way we see the
role of particles in the context of variable word order. 1.3 introduces the option of
having in the very same clause more than a single DiP. 1.4 turns to the locality of

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226 Josef Bayer

licensing a DiP. In 1.5, I will argue that this licensing should be accounted for
with the technology of probe-goal agreement.

1.1 Semantic contribution

DiPs are geared to certain clause types (declarative, polar interrogative, wh-inter-
rogative, exclamative, imperative etc.) and arise mainly in root clauses. They make
a semantic contribution by co-determining the illocutionary force of an utterance
(Thurmair 1989; Coniglio 2011). For reasons to be seen shortly, our focus will be on
particles that arise in constituent questions. Particles which appear in these
questions, but not necessesaily only there, are denn (lit. ‘then’), wohl (lit. ‘well’),
nur/bloß (lit. ‘only’/‘barely’), schon (lit. ‘already’) and perhaps some more. Since
our primary goal is not to give a detailed account of their contribution to illocu-
tionary meaning, it will suffice to consider the variations in (2) over the particle-
free wh-question in (1), and to characterize them descriptively.

(1) Wo wohnt er?

where lives he
‘Where does he live?’

(2) a. Wo wohnt er denn?

(2a) means that given a common ground CG between speaker and hearer, where
does he live in relation to some aspect of CG; denn is quasi anaphoric to CG. If the
CG that relates to the open proposition, here λx, he lives in x, is missing, denn
fails to refer, and the question fails pragmatically. This blocks denn-questions
out-of-the-blue (see König 1977; Wegener 2002; Grosz 2005; Bayer 2012).1

b. Wo wohnt er wohl?

In assertive clauses, wohl signals uncertainty of the speaker toward the proposi-
tion p. According to Zimmermann (2008), the request for an assertion by the

1 Assume you chat with someone who has learned in the course of the conversation that you are
new in town. Your interlocuter may ask you Wo wohnen Sie denn? Imagine alternatively that you
went to the registration office. The employee’s job is to write down your data. This person can ask
you Wo wohnen Sie? but hardly Wo wohnen Sie denn? The reason is that there is normally no or
no presumed relevant CG which denn could point to. Using denn in this situation is, so to say,
none of the employee’s business.

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 227

hearer allows in this case an assertion that is weakened toward a guess or a

speculation. While the question remains what it normally is, wohl affects the
propositional commitment of the addressee allowing it to be presumably (p)
instead of p.

c. Wo wohnt er nur/bloß?

In (2c), the speaker signals that he/she has so far unsuccessfully tried to find an
answer; Obenauer (2004) has aptly dubbed questions of this type I-CAN’T-FIND-
THE-VALUE QUESTIONS (CfvQ) (see also Hinterhölzl and Munaro (2015) for pragmatic
effects of bewilderment and impatience of the the speaker that nur/bloß and also
the particle/adverb nun (lit. ‘now’) give rise to).

d. Wo wird er schon wohnen?

By using schon, the speaker creates some scale by which the entities (here places)
that can replace the variable are ranked according to their plausibility or like-
lihood of yielding a true answer; schon creates the implicature that few entities
are high enough on the scale to make the answer true. This yields a rhetorical
question (see Löbner 1990; Meibauer 1994; Bayer and Obenauer 2011; Egg 2012).

1.2 Word order

Since DiPs may appear in various linear orders, their surface appearance pre-
viously gave rise to the idea that they undergo movement. As expected, no good
reason for such movement could be found though. Although they resemble
adverbs and are in fact treated as adverbs in many accounts, a surprising finding
was that they must not move to the clausal periphery. They can neither move to
SpecCP nor can they be extraposed to the post-verbal domain. From today’s
position, it is quite clear that DiPs arise in a fixed middle-field position, and
other constituents move to their left, e.g. by scrambling operations.2 Although
DiPs contribute to Force, they arise comparatively low in the clause in a fixed
position to the left of vP. Weak pronouns must and other topical constituents may
move to the left of DiP.3

2 See Ormelius-Sandblom (1997).

3 What I say here must be limited to the wh-questions under discussion. The particles ja and
wohl, which are discussed in detail in Coniglio (2011:131ff) show slightly different distributions.

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228 Josef Bayer

(3) a. *Wann könnte denn er ihn mitgenommen haben?

When could DENN he it along-taken have
‘When could he have taken it along? (I’m wondering)’
b. *Wann könnte er denn er ihn mitgenommen haben?
c. Wann könnte er ihn denn er ihn mitgenommen haben?

(4) a. Wann könnte denn Otto den Brief gestern ins Büro
when could DENN Otto the letter yesterday to office
mitgenommen haben?
along-taken have
‘When could Otto have yesterday taken the letter to the office? (I’m
wondering)’
b. Wann könnte Otto denn Otto den Brief gestern ins Büro mitgenommen
haben?
c. Wann könnte Otto den Brief denn Otto den Brief gestern ins Büro mitgen-
ommen haben?
d. Wann könnte Otto den Brief gestern denn Otto den Brief gestern ins Büro
mitgenommen haben?
e. Wann könnte Otto den Brief gestern ins Büro denn Otto den Brief gestern
ins Büro mitgenommen haben?

The conditions under which elements move to the left of the DiP are not
really clear, at least they are less clear than movements across speaker
oriented adverbs as discussed in Frey (2007). For the purposes of this
chapter, it can be assumed that there is a topic field above the DiP
which may host the aboutness topic but perhaps also elements familiar
from the preceding discourse.4 An important function of the DiP is that it
assigns material below its position to the information focus. Notice that in
(4a-d) the unmarked phrasal accent is on the PP, i.e. ins BÜRO mitgenom-
men, while in (4e) the focus domain has shrunk to the verb, i.e. the accent
is MITgenommen.5 Assuming that the DiP takes a fixed position, the phrase
structure appears to be the following.

(5) [ForceP Force° … [FinP Fin° [TopP … [ Prt [vP … ]]]]]

4 The assumption of a TopP is controversial as there is no overt Top-head. We assume it for

concreteness. Alternatives are, of course, possible.
5 This fact is a major reason for Egg and Mursell (2017) to propose a direct dependency between
DiP and focus.

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 229

We cannot discuss here the relative order of Prt in connection with adverbs in
Cinque’s (1999) system. For relevant discussion the reader is referred to Coniglio
(2011). Unlike most adverbs, DiPs are weak closed-class elements. Much of the
inventory of DiPs in German has historically developed out of adverbs or focus
particles in a process of grammaticalization. Unlike most adverbs, DiPs can
neither be preposed nor extraposed; they are immobile. There is a debate about
their X-bar status with rather heterogeneous proposals that range from adverb
(assumed without discussion in most semantic work, and assumed with discus-
sion in Manzini 2015), to “deficient” adverb (Cardinaletti 2011; Coniglio 2005,
2011), to head (Bayer 1996, 1999, 2012; Bayer and Obenauer 2011; Munaro and
Poletto 2004; Petrova 2017; Struckmeier 2014), and even undefined X-bar status
(Meibauer 1994). Assuming head status, a decision that I will further defend
below, allows us to be more concrete about (5).6 In (6), Prt is the head of a PrtP.

(6) [ForceP Force° … [FinP Fin° [TopP … [PrtP Prt° [vP … ]]]]]

Weak pronouns and discourse-identified DPs move into the topic field. It is
important to notice that they do not move into the specifier or Prt. Weak and
topical elements do not associate with Prt. SpecPrtP plays an important role
though, but it is reserved for other elements as we will show in detail below.

1.3 Stacking

DiPs may co-occur in a clause as long as they are clause-type compatible. Their
order is fixed (see Thurmair 1989; Coniglio 2011). In the clause type under
consideration, only the order denn > wohl > schon is allowed.

(7) a. Wann könnte Otto denn den Brief wohl gestern schon ins Büro mitgenom-
men haben?
b. *Wann könnte Otto wohl den Brief denn gestern schon ins Büro mitgenom-
men haben?
c. *Wann könnte Otto schon den Brief wohl gestern denn ins Büro mitgenom-
men haben?

6 The top argument against head status has for a long time been that it would inhibit V2. This
argument is entirely theory dependent. See Bayer and Obenauer (2011) for a possible solution.
Svenonius and Bentzen (2016) suggest that V-movement may not be conventional movement at
all. As long as the nature of head movement is still rather unclear, one should meet this
argument against head status with reservation.

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230 Josef Bayer

Merger of DiPs does not change the basic syntactic category of VP/vP. The reason
for this is that DiPs – like other particles too – are syncategorematic heads. In this
sense, they do not disrupt the projective spine of the verb, and scrambling out of
VP/vP does not differ from regular scrambling. Under the assumption of a topic
field, (7a) suggests that each of the DiPs is associated with a topic field. However
as far as I see, nothing much hinges on this particular solution. The order in
which stacked DiPs must appear seems to be a matter of scope although the
rationale behind it is so far not clear. One reviewer suspects that one DiP
“selects” another particle projection, and that this would be inhibited by scram-
bling into intermediate positions as seen in (7a). However, selection cannot play
a role here for the simple reason that DiPs are optional. Notice that (7a) remains
perfectly grammatical if wohl is missing: Wann könnte Otto denn den Brief gestern
schon ins Büro mitgenommen haben? If denn selects a wohlP like a verb selects a
PP, ungrammaticality would result, contrary to fact.

1.4 Long-distance dependency and scope

Notice now that Force c-commands the DiP, but the DiP is arguably not part of
ForceP. How can it contribute to Force? Potential solutions in terms of LF movement
or formal feature movement must be discarded. As Bayer, Häussler and Bader (2016)
point out, question-dependent DiPs may show up in embedded clauses from which
wh-movement has taken place. Consider the rhetorical questions in (8).

(8) a. Wo glaubst du, dass man hier nachts um 3 Uhr

Where believe you that one here at.night at 3 o’clock
schon Benzin bekommt?
SCHON gasoline gets
‘Where do you believe that one can get gasoline here at 3 o’clock in the
night? – Nowhere/hardly anywhere!’
b. #Wo glaubst du schon, dass man hier nachts um 3 Uhr Benzin bekommt?

These examples make two important points: First, (8a) and (8b) differ in meaning. In
(8a), the speaker asks about the places x such that the addressee believes there is a
plausibility ranking of x according to which one can get gasoline in x at 3 o’clock in
the night. (8b) is syntactically flawless but semantically odd because the speaker
asks about the places x such that there is a plausibility ranking of the addressee’s
believing that one can get gasoline in x at 3 o’clock in the night. The oddity comes
from the question’s pragmatic inappropriateness. If schon would raise to the matrix
clause, the seat of illocutionary force, (8a) and (8b) would have the same meaning,

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 231

and (8a) would be as awkward as (8b). However, (8a) is not awkward at all. We can
conclude from this that the DiP takes scope exactly in the surface position in which
we see it. Notice secondly that LF-movement is known to be clause bound. Raising
the DiP across the CP-boundary would be highly unexpected. A good theory should
try hard to avoid it. In our account, the DiP is a functional head. Functional heads do
not move around. In (8a), LF-movement of the DiP toward Force would be trans-
clausal head-movement. But head-movement is known to stay within the CP-phase.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. As has first been suggested in Bayer and
Obenauer (2011) (see also Bayer 2012; Bayer, Häussler and Bader 2016 and other
researchers who adopted this proposal) DiP may access Force via probe-goal
agreement. Under successive cyclic wh-movement as in (8a), the Q-sensitive DiP
schon can be probed by an uninterpretable interrogative C as indicated by the
dotted lines in (9).7

(9) Wo glaubst du [CP wo daß man hier … [PrtP schon [vP wo Benzin bekommt]]]]?

In the absence of long wh-extraction, the interpretation of schon as a DiP is

unavailable. Why? Short wh-extraction as seen in (10) and its analysis in (11)
leaves the DiP in the CP-phase without offering a chance to probe it from the edge
of this CP.

(10) Wer glaubt, dass man hier nachts um 3 Uhr schon

Who believes that one here at.night at 3 o’clock already
Benzin bekommt?
gasoline gets
‘Who believes that one can get gasoline here already as early as 3 o’clock in
the night?’

(11) Wer glaubt wer [CP daß man hier … [PrtP schon [vP Benzin bekommt]]]]?

Notice that (10)/(11) is grammatical but only under an interpretation of schon that is
irrelevant in the present discussion; schon can only be understood as the temporal
adverb ‘already’, not as the homophonic question-sensitive DiP. As a temporal
adverb, schon does not depend in any obvious sense on a particular clause type

7 If C is +wh, it must be uninterpretable. If it were interpretable, selection of the CP by the verb

glauben would lead to a semantic conflict.

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232 Josef Bayer

and the illocutionary force of the utterance. It is not a root phenomenon. The
syntactic inaccessibility graphically depicted in (11) predicts that the interpretation
of schon as a DiP is excluded in this case.8

1.5 Probe/goal agreement

The next question is how DiPs can contribute to the semantic composition of Force.
As we have shown, it does not happen by anything like movement, LF or otherwise.
As already said in the previous section, my proposal is that Force is linked to the DiP
by probe-goal agreement. This relation enables the left-peripheral representation of
illocutionary force to team up in a syntactically defined local domain with features of
the DiP that provide information about the speaker’s hypothesis about the speech
situation and the epistemic state of the addressee. Moving to a more technical level,
assume that DiPs have an uninterpretable and unvalued clause-type (CT) feature,
here abbreviated as uQ[ ]. This is well motivated because DiPs are clause-type
sensitive. The DiPs under consideration have this feature among others. At the
same time, illocutionary interpretability never resides in the DiP but in a potential
Force/CT head which c-commands the DiP. Thus, the DiP is plausibly probed by a
CT-head, here Q[ ]. Q[ ] must ultimately be interpretable but may at an intermediate
stage of the derivation also be uninterpretable. This is possible in the feature sharing
theory of probe/goal agreement proposed in Pesetsky and Torrego (2007), which I
adopt here. There is good motivation for splitting up Force in CT and speech act
(SA).9 Speas and Tenny (2003), Haegeman (2002), Haegeman and Hill (2013),

8 It may be important to know that long wh-extraction as seen in (8)/(9) does not enforce the
interpretation as a DiP. The example allows the interpretation of schon as a temporal adverb as
well. Thus, (8)/(9) is ambiguous whereas (10)/(11) is unambiguous.
9 Notice that in German, the ASS(ertion)-sensitive DiP ja can co-occur with the Q-sensitive DiP
denn in a question if ja belongs to a separate clausal or quasi-clausal domain as in

(i) Wo hast du [DP diesen [AP ja unwahrscheinlich begabten] Pianisten]

Where have you this JA incredibly gifted pianist
denn gehört?
DENN heard
‘Where did you hear this indeed incredibly gifted pianist? (I’m wondering)’

The speaker who takes responsibility for the adequacy of ja is identical with the speaker who takes
responsibility for the adequacy of denn. The AP is quasi by default an “assertive” CT but does not
constitute an SA. It must be linked to the speaker of the SA of the root clause (see Hinterhölzl and
Krifka 2013; Struckmeier 2014; Viesel 2017). It is the speaker of the root clause who also takes
responsibility of the DiP inside AP.

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 233

Miyagawa (2012), Coniglio and Zegrean (2012) and others argue for the syntactic
representation in the form of a speech act phrase (SAP). The derivation for licensing a
Q-sensitive DiP under cyclic wh-movement runs as in (12), where we symbolize
valuation by 1.

(12) a. [vP wh [vP … wh … ]] ⇨ MERGE Prt ⇨

b. [PrtP PrtuQ[ ] [vP … wh … ]]] ⇨ MOVE wh ⇨
c. [CTP CTuQ[ ] [CP wh C [TP … [PrtP PrtuQ[ ] [vP … wh … ]]]]] ⇨ AGREE ⇨
d. [CTP CTuQ[1] [CP wh C [TP … [PrtP PrtuQ[1] [vP … wh … ]]]]] ⇨ MOVE wh ⇨
…
e. [SAP SAuQ[ ] [CTP CTiQ[ ] [FinP wh [Fin’ Vfin [TP … [CTP CTuQ[1] [CP wh C [TP … [PrtP
PrtuQ[1] [vP … wh … ]]]]]]]]]] ⇨ AGREE ⇨
f. [SAP SAuQ[1] [CTP CTiQ[1] [FinP wh [Fin’ Vfin [TP … [CTP CTuQ[1] [CP wh C [TP … [PrtP
PrtuQ[1] [vP … wh … ]]]]]]]]]]

Agreement between CT and Prt guarantees that the CT is of the type that
results from the application of Prt to CT. Provided that (12d) is part of a
dependent clause, CT is formally present – consider the notion of an
intermediate wh-trace – but nevertheless uninterpretable.10 Here, CT agrees
with Prt. Further wh-movement leads to (12e). Since wh stops in SpecFinP
of the root clause, CT is interpretable. The root clause is not only a
proposition but in addition a speech act. By transitivity, agreement
between SA and CT guarantees that the root clause is an interrogative
speech act enriched with the specific respective “flavors” of Prt that had
been exemplified in (2) above.11
Importantly, the DiP (Prt) itself does not move. It stays precisely in the pre-vP
position in which it was merged in (12b); in other words, it stays in its irreversible
scope position. Thanks to cyclic wh-movement, the root clause’s CT/SA can
stretch out its fingers to grab the distant DiP without committing a crime against
conditions of syntactic locality.
In the next section, we shall provide evidence to the effect that the
unmarked pre-vP DiP-position is a CRITERIAL position in which movable

10 This amounts to the claim that a CP which served as a transit for wh-movement is in fact
“interrogative”. This feature does not do any harm because it is uninterpretable. It is only
formally present.
11 Egg and Mursell (2017) develop a theory in which CT/SA probes the vP-related focus domain
rather than the DiP. The DiP has an unvalued focus feature which is valued by the interpretable
focus feature on vP. Thus, the relation between CT/SA and DiP is at best an indirect relation. It
remains to be seen how the CT-dependency of DiPs can follow.

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234 Josef Bayer

elements of the right type undergo CRITERIAL FREEZING. This finding will then
be taken up again in section 4 to show how, within the theory developed so
far, a natural account of focus particles follows almost automatically. At this
stage, it will become clear that the syntax of DiPs and the syntax of focus
particles rests on the same basic architecture.

2 Discourse particles ex situ

One of the classical diagnostics for DiP-status is their immobility (see

Thurmair 1989 and arbitrary further work on DiPs). We interpreted this
as following from their status as functional heads. According to this
analysis, DiPs are on a par with v, T, Neg, C, Fin, Force etc. There is
T-to-C movement, and functional elements occasionally undergo cliticiza-
tion. In general, however, functional heads stay put; it is lexical heads
and not functional heads which move to functional heads. Given that they
can be probed from a c-commanding position, DiPs are heads for which
there is no prima facie reason to move. As heads, they would not qualify
for A’-movement to save the V2-constraint.12 Thus, although DiPs are
traditionally understood as “idiosyncracies” of German, they turn out to
be part of the functional grid on which clause structure rests, and they
conform to its rigid order of constituents.

12 As Cardinaletti (2011) points out, DiPs are not contrastable and can therefore not be ques-
tioned, and they cannot undergo coordination. It needs to be said that they share these proper-
ties with certain higher adverbs like the speaker-oriented adverb leider (‘unfortunately’), which
are clearly different from DiPs. The issue is too big to be adequately addressed within the
confines of this contribution. Nevertheless, an illustrative case is that, as in most OV-languages,
many light adverbs in German can be shifted to a post-verbal position.

(i) a. Karl hat drauf verZICHtet

b. Karl hat drauf verZICHtet drauf
‘Karl gave up on it.’

Functional heads such as the neg-head nicht never undergo such PF-related movement.

(ii) a. Karl konnte gestern nicht KOMmen

b. *Karl konnte gestern nicht KOMmen nicht
‘Yesterday, Karl could not come.’

DiPs do not pattern with light adverbs. They are on a par with bona fide functional heads.

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 235

2.1 DiPs travelling with wh-phrases

Nevertheless, even this diagnostic seems to have a hole: Unexpectedly, DiPs can
be displaced to the left periphery if they co-occur with a wh-phrase, and they can
do this even “long distance”.13

13 Contrary to what one reviewer suspects, also other DiPs than those discussed here can
participate in this construction, e.g. eigentlich (‘actually’). Furthermore, one can also find DiPs
that form a constituent with other elements than wh-phrases. Consider the DiP eben (lit. ‘even’)
that occurs in assertive clauses. Instead of the expectable das ist eben …, both Schiller and
Grillparzer use the following stylistically more elaborate and exciting forms.

(i) Das eben ist der Fluch der bösen Tat, daß sie, fortzeugend,
this EBEN is the oath (of) the evil deed that it procreatingly
immer Böses muß gebären.
always evil must create
J.C. Friedrich Schiller, Wallenstein, 1800.

(ii) Das eben ist der Liebe Zaubermacht, daß sie veredelt, was ihr
this EBEN is the love’s magic.power that it ennobles what its
Hauch berührt, …
breath touches
Franz Grillparzer, Sappho, 1819.

The demonstrative pronoun must be emphatically accented, and the preverbal position is by all
means occupied by a single constituent. Systematic searches reveal also examples in current
ordinary language. Here are two examples with eben and wohl, the latter of which may appear
in assertive clauses as well as in questions.

(iii) Manche eben können es nicht

Some EBEN can it not
‘Some can just not do it’
https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/petitionen/_2011/_04/_11/Petition_17637/forum/
Beitrag_135586.$$$.batchsize.10.tab.2.html (26.01.2017)

(iv) Manche wohl können nur kalt sein, obwohl niemand was für
some WOHL can only cold be although nobody something for
seinen Hauttyp kann.
his skin.type can
‘Some can perhaps only be cold although nobody is responsible for his/her type of skin’
http://www.akne.org/threads/gro%C3%9Fe-poren-auf-der-nase.36463/

It is so far not clear to me why these cases are less frequent and perhaps also less systematic than
those in wh-questions.

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236 Josef Bayer

(13) a. [An wen denn] könnte er sich [an wen denn] gewandt haben?
at who DENN could he REFL turned have
‘Who on earth could he have turned to?’
b. [An wen denn] glaubst du, [[an wen denn] dass er sich [an wen denn]
gewandt haben könnte]?
‘Who on earth do you believe that he could he have turned to?’

As my use of square bracket suggests, whP + DiP form a constituent. If not, the
V2-constraint would be violated. The examples in (13) come across as nothing
else but standard cases of wh-movement. No degradation in grammaticality can
be noticed. However, if this is true, DiP is really ex situ, outside its rigid scope
position we have been arguing for, and in blatant violation of the general
semantic requirement that a DiP is like any other operator supposed to take
scope over a proposition. Notice that according to standard assumptions, vP
embraces the external argument and therefore represents the minimum of a
proposition, in other words, what Chomsky (1986), with binding theory in
mind, considers to be a COMPLETE FUNCTIONAL COMPLEX.
A second scandal emerges in connection with rigid order. The strict hierar-
chy that had been diagnosed in the previous section, e.g. denn > wohl > schon in
the examples in (7), seems to be disrupted in the well-formed example

(14) [An wen schon] wird er sich damals denn gewandt haben?
‘Who on earth will he have turned to after all in those days?’ (the answer is
obvious)

In (14), the surface order of the DiPs is schon > denn. This order is normally strictly
excluded (see (15a)), even across a CP-boundary (see (15b)):

(15) a. *[An wen] wird er sich schon denn gewandt haben?

b. *[An wen] glaubst du schon, dass er sich damals denn gewandt haben
wird?

The pertinent questions are (i) how can phrases like wh+DiP emerge, and (ii)
how can one account for the rather alarming exception to word order and
scope? My answer will be, as I will shortly show in detail, that in (15), the
DiPs schon and denn are “in-situ”, i.e. in scope positions, and that these are
irreversible. The DiPs have, so to say, been merged into positions where they
are frozen from the start. In (14), however, only denn is in a scope position while
the DiP schon is part of a complex wh-phrase. The latter particle is “ex-situ”.

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 237

This gives reason to believe that the ex-situ DiP may have actually taken scope
lower than the in-situ DiP. With this hypothesis, we are on the right track, as I
will show. In the following, my account is presented in six steps. The important
aspect of the particle’s scope variability will be first addressed in (II) and then
developed in detail.

2.2 The core of the account

(I) DiPs do have a fixed position in the functional cartography of the clause as
has been shown in section 1. This generalization will remain untouched.
(II) However, DiPs can alternatively be merged with a wh-phrase. This operation
yields what Bayer and Obenauer (2011) have dubbed ‘SMALL PARTICLE PHRASE’
(SPrtP). This reminds us of a possibility that plays a role in various accounts
of focus particles. In research about focus particles, there is one camp
which essentially prevents focus particles from attaching to any non-pro-
position phrase. The motivation for this is throughout semantic in nature.14
There is another camp according to which focus particles may undergo free
merger with arbitrary major constituents: DP, PP, CP, next to the standard
case vP.15 We will take up the issue in more detail in section 4. For the time
being, let us assume here that the latter camp is right, and that the finding
that DiPs can be merged with a wh-phrase adds new syntactic support for
this theory. It is important to know that the particle in a SPrtP is not in a
scope position, and that, as a consequence, a SPrtP has to undergo move-
ment to a scope position in the sense of (I).
(III) Assuming that a DiP can form a constituent with an arbitrary wh-phrase,
what could be the motivation for this? Word order alternations do not
arise without reason, as we have learned. Following Bayer and Obenauer
(2011), DiPs are heads of type Prt° which may undergo merger with a wh-
XP and then force wh to raise to their left. The reason for this is that Prt°
may bear a feature for EMPHASIS. In fact, all these constructions share a
special expressive property of excitement. The wh-phrase in the wh+Prt
construction bears distinctive phonetic prominence, and questions with
this construction are interpreted as exclaimed constituent questions, i.e.

14 See Jacobs (1983), with a somewhat different orientation Büring and Hartmann (2001),
Kleemann-Krämer (2010), and more recently Hole (2015).
15 This view has been defended in Bayer (1996, 1999) and in Reis (2005) for German, and in
Barbiers (2014) for Dutch.

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238 Josef Bayer

questions which are uttered with an enhanced level of excitement by the

speaker. Trotzke and Turco (2015) support this impression with experi-
mental data that show a distinct acoustic signature for this construction as
compared with a) the non-adjacent position (wh … Prt°) and b) to the
adjacent position of a PP (wh+PP …, e.g. [Wo bei euch] kann ich heute … ?
‘Where at your place can I … ?’). In the Trotzke and Turco study, the onset
of the wh-word,/vo/, and the following vowel are significantly longer in
the SPrtP. As in the study by Niebuhr (2010), the intensifying emphatically
pronounced words are not realized with steeper pitch slopes than corre-
sponding non-emphatic words. This suggests the existence of a specific
phonetic correlate that distinguishes emphatic fronting from correlates of
information structure.16 In technical terms, we assume that the derivation
of a SPrtP runs as in (16), where 7 is an arbitrarily chosen agreement index.
The head Prt° bears an uninterpretable feature of emphasis that is valued
and subsequently deleted by a wh-phrase with a corresponding interpre-
table feature of emphasis.

(16) a. Prt°uEmp [ ] wh iEmp [ ] ⇨ MOVE ⇨

b. [wh iEmp [ ] [Prt°uEmp [ ] wh iEmp [ ] ]] ⇨ AGREE ⇨
c. [wh iEmp [7] [Prt°uEmp [7] wh iEmp [7] ]]

The interested reader may consult Bayer and Trotzke (2015) for further
discussion of this analysis and a remarkable extension that integrates the
attachment of multiple DiPs as can be seen in examples like an wen denn
wohl schon (‘to who DENN WOHL SCHON’), which are by all means part of a
single constituent.

16 Although this could not be systematically explored so far, there is a strong impression that
SPrtPs need to be fronted and cannot stay in situ in multiple questions. Consider the contrast
between (i) and (ii).

(i) An wen denn könnte er sich wann gewandt haben?

at who DENN could he REFL when turned have
‘Who on earth could he have turned to when?’
(ii) ?*An wen könnte er sich wann denn gewandt haben?
at who could he REFL when DENN turned have
‘Who could he have turned to when on earth?’

The contrast is reminiscent of Pesetsky’s (1987) observations about multiple what-the-hell

questions.

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 239

(IV) Given the phrase structure in (6), SPrtP cannot be derived from this
structure. Movement of wh to the right of the head of the particle phrase
(PrtP) would among other violations violate the EXTENSION CONDITION, see
Chomsky (1995), that requires that syntactic operations may extend the
tree only at the root. Furthermore, moving away the scope-bearing pre-
vP particle would violate scope freezing as assumed throughout, see
(I).17 Let us therefore keep to the insight that the scope of a DiP that
has been merged into a scope position is immune to further derivational
manipulation. Thus, an alternative derivation is needed by which the
SPrtP is mapped onto the phrase structure in (6).
(V) The alternative is to build SPrtP in a separate workspace WS2 and to add it to
the numeration that serves workspace WS1 to build VP, vP and its structural
extensions. SPrtP is first merged in vP. Being a wh-phrase, it needs to undergo

17 Reis (1992) suggests in passing that the DiP may cliticize to the wh-phrase from its base
position. This would, however, amount to extraction of the DiP from its otherwise irreversible
scope position, and it is unclear why the process of cliticization may target exactly a wh-phrase
and nothing else. One reviewer suggests that the assumption of a SPrtP could be unnecessary
because the wh-phrase may move through the specifier of the PrtP in the course of which Prt
could cliticize to it. The wh-phrase could land in SpecPrtP in order to value the uninterpretable
Prt-feature uQ[ ] under Spec-head agreement. Like Reis (1992), this proposal misses the impor-
tant point that DiPs are functional heads but no clitics. Interestingly, there is one exception:
denn has also a clitic form, namely –n. As shown in Bayer (2012) and Weiß (2013), –n undergoes
Wackernagel-cliticization in various dialects and spoken varieties. Even more interesting is the
fact that cliticization to a wh-phrase leads to severe ungrammaticality. Compare the difference
between (i), a variant of (2a), and (ii).

(i) Wo wohnt-n der?

where lives -N he
(ii) *Wo -n wohnt der?
where-N lives he

Apart from this, it would be quite implausible for a trisyllabic element like eigentlich to behave
like a clitic. Nevertheless, there are examples like (iii).

(iii) Von wem eigentlich hat er das abgeschrieben?

from who EIGENTLICH has he this copied
‘Who did he actually copy this from?’

Thus, we can be sure that cliticization of Prt to the wh-phrase offers no viable alternative to the
explanation suggested here.

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240 Josef Bayer

A’-movement and is in a first step moved to the phase-edge of vP. In agreement

with the copy-theory of movement, the SPrtP leaves a copy behind. As the
derivation proceeds, the functional head Prt is merged with vP and projects a
PrtP. Prt is normally an empty head.18 This is in full analogy to the merger of an
empty C-head in wh-movement constructions. Prt has at this stage the unin-
terpretable unvalued feature uPrt[ ]. The SPrtP moves into the specifier of PrtP
and values uPrt[ ]. At this point, the particle is de-activated and its scope is
frozen.19
(VI) The SPrtP is, of course, also a wh-phrase whose wh-feature is still active. It
cannot be de-activated before the upper clausal periphery (here SpecFinP)
has been reached. Thus, the SPrtP moves out of SpecPrtP again. [Wh+Prt] is a
syntactic constituent in which the phonetic occurrence of Prt is pied-piped
along with the wh-XP. The corresponding functional head stays and marks
the particle’s frozen scope. It is important to see that at this stage the Prt of
the SPrtP has no core grammatical function any longer. This is in agreement
with the classical observation that DiPs are immobile. Their displacement to
the left periphery is simply an epiphenomenon of pied piping. (17) gives the
derivation (features sometimes suppressed for readability):

(17) a. [(…) V] ⇨ MERGE SPrtP ⇨

b. [vP … SPrtP (…)V] ⇨ MOVE SPrtP ⇨
c. [vP SPrtP[vP … SPrtP (…)V]] ⇨ MERGE Prt ⇨
d. [PrtP PrtuPrt[ ] [vP SPrtP[vP … SPrtP (…)V]]] ⇨ MOVE SPrtP ⇨
e. [PrtP SPrtPiPrt[ ] [Prt’ PrtuPrt[ ] [vP SPrtP[vP … SPrtP (…)V]]]] ⇨ AGREE ⇨
f. [PrtP SPrtPiPrt[9] [Prt’ PrtuPrt[9] [vP SPrtP[vP … SPrtP (…)V]]]]

18 See however Bayer (forthcoming) and Barbiers (2010; 2014), as well as the brief discussion at
the end of this section.
19 Saying that Prt has the uninterpretable unvalued feature uPrt[ ] that gets valued by a SPrtP
moving into SpecPrtP is a mechanical consequence of the feature valuation mechanism.
Depending on the clause type in which a DiP occurs, the particle has also a “contentive” feature,
in the case of interrogatives the feature uQ[ ]. If uQ[ ] is part of the SPrtP, it will become part of
the Prt-projection it is attracted to. From there, it will be valued by Force as shown in the
derivation in (12). DiPs that attract a wh-phrase to their left have in addition the feature uEmp[ ].
This feature gets valued by a wh-phrase that bears an interpretive feature of emphasis. Keeping
track of the different features is difficult, and I tried to represent only those which play a role in a
certain process. Thanks to one reviewer who asked for clarification.
Peter Culicover (p.c.) asks whether merger of the empty Prt-head could take place with a
particular vP from a series of vP-shells in which the different verbs form a V-cluster. I did not find
a way how to trace potential semantic differences. Thus, I assume for the time being that Prt is
merged with the upmost vP-shell.

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 241

(17f) is the stage at which the particle of the SPrtP is deactivated and frozen. Due
to the concomitant decomposition of SPrtP into Prt and the wh-phrase proper, the
semantic problem of scope failure is solved. The DiP has clausal scope despite the
formation of a SPrtP.20
Further movement raises SPrtP, which is, of course, also a wh-phrase, into
SpecFinP etc.

g. [FinP SPrtPiwh[12] [Fin’ Finuwh[12] … [PrtP SPrtPiwh[12]; iPrt[9] [Prt’ PrtuPrt[9]

[vP SPrtP [vP … SPrtP (…)V]]]]]

This concludes the core of my proposal. We can now see the merits it has.
One merit is that the account respects natural constituency as could be
observed in movement and observance of the V2-constraint. Another one is
that it offers a motivation of the construction. The ex-situ example (13a),
An wen denn könnte er sich gewandt haben?, is not synonymous with the
in-situ example An wen könnte er sich denn gewandt haben?. The former
expresses a degree of exclamativity and excitement of the speaker that is
missing in the second one. According to the present account, the examples
rest on different derivations on the basis of the same lexical items. A third
merit is that it solves the problem of apparently wrong order in a straight-
forward way. Recall that example (14) is well-formed but shows the linear
order schon > denn, which is banned otherwise. The present theory
declares the surface order as irrelevant because schon has taken scope
below denn before it moved along with the wh-XP wen. Scope freezing is
visualized in (18) with ✓.

(18) [FinP [An wen schon] wird er sich damals [PrtP1 denn [PrtP2 [an wen schon] Prt✓
[vP … [an wen schon] gewandt haben]]]]?

Schon is scopally irrelevant in its surface position but relevant in the medial
position. In the medial position it takes scope via agreement with the bold-
faced functional category Prt, and this position is below the DiP denn, as it

20 Arguing against this analysis would be like arguing against wh-phrases which are of sub-
propositional size and move to a position in which they attain scope over a proposition. I know
of no linguist who has proposed that which man cannot be a DP because the inherent wh-
operator does not scope over DPs.

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242 Josef Bayer

should be. Thus, the relevant order is exactly the attested one, namely denn >
schon.
As one reviewer correctly notes, the transition from (17f) to (17g) is not
compatible with the Criterion approach as formulated in Rizzi (2006: 112).
According to Rizzi, a phrase meeting a criterion is frozen in place. What is important
here is the a in both a phrase and a criterion. The principle as formulated here stops
a unique phrase XP with a unique feature F in some criterial position whose head
matches F. No further movement obtains because F has ceased to be active. As we
have seen, however, the SPrtP is actually composed of two phrases. It is a wh-
phrase that is immediately dominated by a shell that is headed by a particle. Due to
this dominance relation, the SPrtP is at first a particle phrase. As such it is raised to
the specifier of the silent Prt-head where it is deactivated. So far, this is exactly
what Rizzi (2006) suggests. Since the SPrtP involves next a wh-phrase with an
active wh-feature, and since this wh-feature cannot be de-activated in SpecPrtP,
the SPrtP must move on to the left edge of the clause where wh-checking takes
place. The only question I see here is why the derivation pied-pipes the SPrtP
instead of using sub-extraction of the wh-phase. Although I do not have a water-
tight answer, the reason seems to be that sub-extraction of the wh-phrase would
disrupt the emphatic construction that motivates the formation of a SPrtP in the
first place. Apart from the pied-piping issue, the logic of the derivation seems
to be completely in line with the Criterion approach and Criterial Freezing.21 (19)
visualizes the word order and reconstruction consequence of my account.

21 As Abels (2012: 83ff) shows, there are various other cases which argue against an overly rigid
understanding of Rizzi’s Criterion approach. A well-known example is the variant of (i) in (ii)
that has been detected and discussed in Reis and Rosengren (1992).

(i) Stell dir vor, wen Peter besucht hat!

imagine REFL Prt who.ACC Peter visited has
‘Imagine who Peter visited!’
(ii) Wen stell dir vor, dass Peter besucht hat!
who.ACC imagine REFL Prt that Peter visited has

It can be argued that the movement that lifts wen into the root clause is not wh-move-
ment that could interfere with the wh-criterion but rather a form of topicalization of the
wh-phrase. If so, the case would be analogous to the one under discussion. A detailed
discussion of freezing effects and their theoretical accounts would go far beyond the
scope of this contribution as the discussions in Müller (2010) and in other contributions
to the present volume show.

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 243

(19)
check wh!

an wen schon
check Prt!
Vfin

wird ... Prt°1

denn ...

an wen schon Prt°2 vP

... an wen schon ...

SPrtPs move like wh-phrases, the difference being that there is yet another feature to
take care of. If we are right, the head of the SPrtP is Prt. The wh-phrase is embedded
in SPrtP. Given this dominance relation, it is expected that the SPrtP moves first to a
position where it values the functional category Prt°, which is in (19) Prt°2. From this
point onwards, the DiP schon of the SPrtP an wen schon is inactive. The head Prt°1
which hosts the DiP denn is irrelevant and would anyway be skipped because the
features of schon and denn are distinct. This makes the SPrtP transparent for the wh-
feature, and it can move on to a destination in which it values the wh-feature which
for the sake of the present discussion we assume resides in Fin.
The combination of copy movement with the fact that DiPs are optional
elements predicts ambiguities. Since Prt is merged optionally, and since SPrtP
moves cyclically through SpecCP, SPrtP may value a silent Prt-head either locally
or at a distance. Consider (20).

(20) [Vor wem denn] glaubst du, dass sich James Bond schon
from who DENN believe you that REF James Bond SCHON
fürchten würde?
fear would
‘Who do you believe that James Bond would be afraid of?’ – Of no one, of
course!

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244 Josef Bayer

Since the freezing point of the SPrtP may be in the matrix clause or in the
embedded clause, an ambiguity is expected. This ambiguity is real as corre-
sponding examples with denn in situ reveal.

(21) a. Vor wem glaubst du, dass sich James Bond denn schon fürchten würde?
b. Vor wem glaubst du denn, dass sich James Bond schon fürchten würde?

The meaning of (21a) is that there is a common ground CG between speaker

and hearer such that the speaker asks the hearer rhetorically who James
Bond would be afraid of in relation to CG. The meaning of (21b) is that
there is a common ground CG between speaker and hearer such that the
speaker asks the hearer rhetorically who in the world of the hearer’s
beliefs James Bond would be afraid of in relation to CG. The difference
may be subtle, but our discussion of (8) above has shown that it is likely to
be real. The important fact is that (20) embraces both of the readings
expressed in (21).

2.3 Particle doubling

The account of SPrtPs in terms of a dual structure gives rise to new questions.
Since the SPrtP must cycle through a type-corresponding and scope-bearing
PrtP, it could in principle be possible that the head of PrtP is not silent but
equally spelled out. Barbiers (2010; 2014) finds such data in Dutch focus particle
constructions and gives an account for them which is close to what I am propos-
ing here.22 One of his examples is (22).

(22) Maar een boek ken ik maar

only one book know I only
‘I know only one book.’

Here, [maar een boek] is a constituent which has passed through a particle
projection in which the lower particle maar is in its scope position. Searches on
the internet could spot many examples of DiP-doubling in which the structure is
arguably the same as in (19) with the difference that the head-position Prt°2 is

22 If it appears that Dutch has FP doubling while German has DiP doubling, this would be a
strange parameter. In fact, I believe, both languages have both. For some discussion see Bayer
(forthcoming). However, the issue awaits further research.

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 245

lexically filled with the DiP whose scope we are claiming gets frozen in this
position.23

(23) a. Warum nur seid ihr nur sooo gehässig?

why NUR are youPL NUR so spiteful
‘Why on earth are you so bitchy?’
http://www.purkersdorf-online.at/komm/_da.php?ar=7&num=02046-00001-00001-
00002-00001-00001-00000-00000-00000-00000 (25.01.2016)
b. Warum nur war er nur so unerreichbar für mich?
why NUR was he NUR so unreachable for me
‘Why on earth is he so unreachable for me?’
https://www.wattpad.com/78507062-i-wish-larry-german-au-kapitel-19 (25.01.2016)
c. Wer wohl ist wohl der Typ mit dem Doppelkinn, und
who WOHL is WOHL the guy with the double chin and
der spärlichen Frisur?
the sparse hair
‘Who may be the guy with the double chin and the sparse hair?’
http://www.wrestling-infos.de/board/showthread.php?t=25441 (23.01.2016)
d. Vor was denn ist er denn geflüchtet?
from what DENN is he DENN fled
‘What did he flee from, I’m wondering’
http://www.trennungsschmerzen.de/verlassen-mit-baby-wer-noch-t604.html
(24.01.2016)
e. Wer schon hätte schon Lust gehabt, seine Freunde zu
who SCHON hadSUBJ SCHON mood had his friends to
verpfeifen?
squeal-on
‘Who after all would have been in the mood to squeal on his friends? –
(No one!)’
https://books.google.de/books?id=r4QhCwAAQBAJ&pg = PT1870&lpg=PT1870&dq=%
22wer+schon+h%C3%A4tte+schon%22&source=bl&ots=WlLJ9Odk19&sig=qQwFZxfSv
c4qpJc4kee052vyK8U&hl=de&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiX8vLkjMDKAhWEGCwKHcqxDnA-
Q6AEIHzAA#v=onepage&q=%22wer%20schon%20h%C3%A4tte%20schon%22&f=false
(23.01.2013)

23 My thanks to Verena Simmler for running these searches. A detailed discussion of particle
doubling is offered in Bayer (forthcoming). One reviewer expects that the second occurrences of
the DiPs are different from the stand-alone versions of these particles. While this is a possibility, I
believe the two DiPs in the present examples are the same, the second one being the spell-out of
the Prt-head that is otherwise empty.

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246 Josef Bayer

There is no reason to assume doubling in a semantic sense. The interpretable

occurrence of the DiP is in each case the lower one. The emphatically marked wh-
phrase cycles through the criterial position in which it agrees with the Prt-head
before it continues to move on with the wh-phrase for wh-checking. The phone-
tically high occurrence of the DiP in (23a) through (23e) has no semantic sig-
nificance for the computation of its scope.

2.4 WYSIWYG is wrong

This concludes part of my thoughts about the integration of German DiPs into the
syntactic framework of minimalist syntax. The important message is that WHAT
YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET (WYSIWYG) is very likely to be wrong. Once a DiP has
teamed up with a wh-phrase, wh-movement superficially obscures the fact that
the DiP has been de-activated before the complex phrase has reached its surface
position. Thus, a DiP may phonetically appear in a place which is irrelevant for
its scope. In the following section, the debate about focus particles will be
reconsidered in this light as I believe the present account has a lot to recommend
about focus particles as well.

3 Integrating focus particles

The syntax of focus particles (FP) like only and even and their correspondents in
other languages is up to now highly controversial. There are essentially two
camps, the “adverb camp” and the “mixed camp”. At least for the study of
German, the “adverb camp” owes a lot to the groundbreaking work of Jacobs
(1983). Büring and Hartmann (2001) integrated Jacobs’ analysis into more
recent assumptions about syntactic architecture and the questions of syntax-
to-semantics mapping. A core assumption of this approach is that the FP –
syntactically an adverb – always adjoins to a propositional domain, i.e. essen-
tially a vP or a CP. The reason is supposed to be that the FP must take proposi-
tional scope.24 Adjunction to arguments, DP, PP and CPs with an argument role
is excluded. The “mixed camp” as represented by Bayer (1996, 1999), Reis

24 Only has an effect on the truth conditions of a sentence such as John only sleeps. In a suitable
context it means that all the relevant activities that John is engaged in are sleeping activities,
and that other potentially salient activities are excluded.

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 247

(2005), Barbiers (2014) and a few others acknowledges adjunction of FP to the

propositional domain vP but admits also adjunction to other major constituents
such as DP, PP and CP. One problem with this account is that adverbs do not
freely adjoin to arbitrary constituents. In German, the examples in (24) are
ungrammatical.

(24) a. *[Oft [an meine Versicherung]] schreibe ich Briefe

often to my insurance write I letters
‘I often write letters to my insurance’
b. *[Leider [meiner Versicherung]] muss ich oft schreiben
unfortunately myDAT insurance must I often write
‘Unfortunately, I often have to write to my insurance’

These examples would be parsed as inadmissible V3 sentences.25

3.1 Focus particles as functional heads

According to Bayer (1996, 1999) and the spirit of the account of DiPs in the
preceding sections FP is not an adverb but a syncategorematic head which
projects either a vP or some other major constituent, i.e. DP, PP, an argu-
mental CP etc. The result is a particle phrase whose lexical category is
identical with the lexical category of the XP that the particle has been
merged with. FP+DP, FP+PP etc. are then SPrtPs as they have been moti-
vated in the previous section. The assumption in Bayer (1996, 1999) was that
the SPrtP which is formally headed by FP is a quantifier. As such it under-
goes quantifier raising (QR) to a scope position. It is but a small step to
translate this insight into the theory of the Minimalist Program, an issue I
will return to below.
English shows that FPs may form smaller constituents than predicted by the
adverb theory. The restrictions of adverb adjunction are comparable to those
seen in (24). *Often syntax is what I teach, *I did not pay enough attention to
unfortunately statistics etc. are highly deviant. For FPs this is not the case. The
widely known examples in (25) – cf. Taglicht (1984) and Rooth (1985, 1992) – do

25 German does have limited access to V3 as Müller (2003; 2005) has shown, but this possibility
must not be equated with the more or less unconstrained combination that FP-attachment
would imply.

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248 Josef Bayer

not only show that FP+DP must be a constituent but also that this constituent
targets a propositional domain.

(25) a. We are required to [vP study [DP only SYNTAX]] AMBIGUOUS

scope of only unfixed
b. We are required to [only [vP study SYNTAX]] UNAMBIGUOUS
scope of only fixed
c. We are [only [vP required to study SYNTAX]] UNAMBIGUOUS
scope of only fixed

The scope of the FP in (25a) is unfixed and can be fixed in two ways, either by
association with the lower vP or by association with the higher vP. The former
amounts to the reading shown in (25b), the latter to the reading shown in (25c),
with clearly different truth conditions. While the “adverb camp” has to admit
that (25a) presents an exception, the “mixed camp” has the advantage of
explaining why the FP’s scope is frozen in (25b,c) and explaining why it is
not in (25a). The technical implementation of scoping has been a matter of
debate.26 Nevertheless, the data in (25) speak in favor of a dual system as
proposed by the “mixed camp”.
A widely known problem for defenders of the adverb theory of FPs is its
incompatibility with word order in German main clauses. Rigid assumption of
surface scope forces the adoption of unconventional phrase structure according
to which a clause-initial FP has scope over FinP and associates with the adjacent
XP with which it must, of course, not form a constituent.

(26) [FinP Nur [FinP EINER [FinP’ hat [TP die Polizisten angegriffen]]]]
only ONE has the policemen attacked
‘Only ONE person attacked the policemen’

The structure declares the FP nur to be an AdvP that is adjoined to the V2-clause
Einer hat die Polizisten angegriffen. Since there is no prosodic break between the
FP and the rest of the clause, such examples should be genuine V3 structures.
This is strange because examples of this kind do not show the slightest marked-
ness. Another problem is association with focus. The FP must c-command the

26 While Bayer (1996) proposed QR, Kayne (1998) suggested overt movement which is “oblit-
erated” by later steps of remnant movement. With respect to analogous cases of negation,
Błaszczak and Gärtner (2005) suggested an account of what they call extended scope taking in
terms of a requirement of prosodic continuity.

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 249

focus. If this was all there is to say, (26) could also come out as *Nur einer hat die
POLIZISTEN angegriffen. But this focus association is impossible. Büring and
Hartmann (2001: 276) offer a principle which requires FP “to be maximally close
to the focus within a given extended projection”. But even this proviso is not
tenable, as pointed out in Reis (2005: 470 ff.). As long as FP c-commands the
focus-bearing XP, FP and focus can sometimes be separated by an intervening
non-focal XP. Under the mixed theory and the assumption of FP as a Prt-head
that projects a SPrtP, (26) changes to (27).

(27) [FinP [SPrtP Nur EINER [Fin’ hat [TP die Polizisten angegriffen]]]]

Here, FP does not c-command the structure below Fin’. So focus associa-
tion is under tight control. In addition, there is, of course, no reason to
assume V3.
Notice next that there is a word order alternative to (26)/(27) in which
according to the structure in (28b) the focus would not even be c-commanded
by FP.

(28) a. EINER nur hat die Polizisten angegriffen

b. [FinP EINER [FinP nur [Fin’ hat [TP die Polizisten angegriffen]]]]

Büring and Hartmann (2001: 240) express doubts about the acceptability of these
inverted word orders. However, standard reference grammars of German mention
such constructions (cf. Zifonun, Hoffmann and Strecker 1997: 1010), and authentic
examples can easily be found.27 Notice here also the widely known English
example JOHN even understands “Syntactic Structures”. For theories which insist

27 (i) Einer nur kann sie erlösen, und dieser Eine ist nur durch die Liebe
one only can her redeem and this one is only through the love
zu gewinnen
to win
‘Only one person can redeem her, and this person can only be won by love’
http://dl.bertha-dudde.org/books/TB_DE_118.pdf (22.01.2016)
(ii) Alle anderen gingen in Begleitung und sie nur sollte alleine gehen
all others went in company and she only should alone go
wie ein Hund ohne Herrn?
like a dog without master
‘All the others went in company, and only she should go by herself like a dog without
its master’
quoted in Bayer and Obenauer (2011).

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250 Josef Bayer

on scope taking of the FP in its surface position – and adverb theories tend to fall in
this class – cases like (28) present an unsurmountable problem. The FP occupies a
scope position from which it should c-command a focus XP. But as (28b) shows,
this could work only if c-command is relaxed to m-command. But even if more
exceptions and relaxations of this sort are admitted, it remains unclear why
examples like (28a) should occur in the first place.

3.2 Emphatic fronting

In the present context, it cannot be overlooked that preposing of the focal XP to the
left of the FP has essentially the same signature as the ex-situ construction of DiPs
that had been under investigation in section 2. Adopting the gist of my earlier work
in Bayer (1996, 1999), FPs are not only heads in potential scope positions but
possibly also the Prt-head of a SPrtP. In the latter case, the FP may optionally be
endowed with an uninterpretable feature for emphasis. If so, the focal XP moves to
the specifier of SPrtP (SpecSPrtP) and values the uninterpretable emp-feature on
FP. Let me propose that in analogy to (16), there are derivations in which FP forms
an SPrtP together with a focal non-interrogative XP of type NP, DP, PP etc. We start
out with the SPrtP [FP+XP] such as [nur EINER], ‘only ONE’ or [sogar an die
REGIERUNG], ‘even to the GOVERNMENT’. If FP is a Prt head which is endowed
with the feature uEmp[ ], the derivation in (29) is expected.

(29) a. Prt°uEmp [ ] XPiEmp [ ] ⇨ MOVE ⇨

b. [XPiEmp [ ] [Prt°uEmp [ ] XP iEmp [ ] ]] ⇨ AGREE ⇨
c. [XPiEmp [19] [Prt°uEmp [19] XP iEmp [19] ]]

An Emp-marked FP-constituent in the style of (28) such as [an die REGIERUNG

sogar] will then raise like any other SPrtP to the criterial pre-vP in which it agrees
with the standard empty particle head. As in the case of SPrtPs with DiPs, this
move freezes the scope of the FP. Nevertheless, the SPrtP can move on to satisfy
whatever further feature needs to be satisfied in the upper position of the

(iii) Heute nur ist das noch möglich

Today only is this still possible
‘Only today is this still possible.’
http://www.archive.org/stream/3569904/3569904_djvu.txt (27.01.2016)

Notice that all of these are markedly emphatic expressions in comparison with their counter-
parts in which the FP precedes the focal XP: nur einer; nur sie; nur heute.

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 251

declarative sentence clause. In standard cases such as (28a), EINER nur hat die
Polizisten angegriffen, the SPrtP satisfies the V2-constraint, but this movement
has nothing to do with the role that the FP plays. FP has been deactivated before
the SPrtP moves on to SpecFinP. If I am right, it would be hard for the adverb
theory (a) to make sense of the focus+FP word order and (b) to derive the
emphatic reading described above.
A challenging question is why in FP-constructions two word orders are per-
mitted (nur EINER vs. EINER nur) whereas in DiP-constructions only the inverted
one is permitted (AN WEN denn vs. *denn AN WEN). My explanation is that the FP-
construction is based on focus association. Here the FP needs to c-command the
focal associate. The focus needs to be “bound” as some researchers used to say.
Once the FP, however, carries an Emp-feature, this feature lives its own life, and
the focal XP has to raise to its specifier to check the Emp-feature. The situation in
DiP-constructions is different because they do not – at least not according to
standard assumptions – associate with a focal XP. However, they can have a
feature of emphasis. Assuming that Emp can only be checked under fronting,
which seems to be strongly supported empirically, DiP-constructions display only
one word order, namely the “inverted” one. The order DiP+wh has no grammati-
cally motivated existence and will not be spelled out after first merge.

3.3 Long-distance dependency

In (20) and (21) of section 3, we could demonstrate that a SPrtP, e.g. vor wem
denn, can have left a copy in the embedded clause or in the matrix clause. The
DiP can have undergone Criterial Freezing in the lower CP or in the higher CP.
This explains the ambiguity. Do we find something similar in connection with
FPs? Yes, we do. The example in (30), which was provided by an anonymous
reviewer, is ambiguous between the two readings displayed in (31).

(30) Nur den PETER hat die Maria gesagt, dass sie liebt.
only the Peter.ACC has the Maria said that she loves

(31) a. Die Maria hat nur gesagt, dass sie den PETER liebt
the Maria has only said that she the Peter.ACC loves
‘Maria only said that she loves PETER (she didn’t say anything else)’
b. Die Maria hat gesagt, dass sie nur den PETER liebt
The Maria has said that she only the Peter.ACC loves
‘Maria said that she loves only PETER (she said she loves nobody but
PETER)’

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252 Josef Bayer

The reading in (31b) is very easy to get. In the present account, this follows
immediately. If there is a PrtP in the embedded CP of (30), the SPrtP nur den
PETER cycles through its specifier and takes scope at this point. Thus, the read-
ing in (31b) is derived. Alternatively, the PrtP could also have been in the matrix
clause. In this case, the SPrtP nur den PETER cycles through the specifier of the
matrix PrtP and takes scope at this upper destination. If in (30) nur would be in a
WYSIWYG-style scope position as the adverb theory claims, we could derive the
reading in (31a) but not the one in (31b), contrary to fact. This is good news for the
present account. Another piece of good news is that the grammar of DiPs and the
grammar of FPs seem to have substantial properties in common. This conceptual
aspect will be taken up again in section 5.

3.4 Relative scope

Let us finally turn to one of the cornerstones of the adverb theory, namely the
treatment of relative scope. The adverb theory makes it a point that the FP takes
scope in its surface position because (32a) is supposed to show only surface scope
and not the reconstructed scope that we see in (32b).

(32) a. Nur seine1 Mutter liebt jeder1 ONLY > EVERY

only his Mother-ACC loves everyone-NOM
b. Jeder1 liebt nur seine1 Mutter EVERY > ONLY
everyone-NOM loves only his Mother-ACC

The argument is that in (32a) the FP nur and its focus-associate seine Mutter cannot
form a constituent. If they would, the FP would be reconstructed below the universal
quantifier together with the DP seine Mutter, and then show the unattested reading
of (32b); cf. Büring and Hartmann (2001: 260ff) and Sternefeld (2006: 336).28 There
are two arguments which militate against this conclusion, one is empirical, the other

28 Hole (2015) adopts the adverb theory but finds a way to circumvent the consequences it has
for constituency. He draws a sharp line between exclusive only and evaluative only. If I under-
stand his proposal correctly, the V2-problem is avoided by the assumption that the FP in the
topicalized part is always an “ad-focus marker”, that it corresponds to the evaluative use of the
FP, and that in this use it is “semantically void” (p. 58). I must admit I have a hard time getting a
semantic difference between the topicalized and the middle field occurrence of the FP.
According to my intuitions, exclusive and evaluative interpretations are equally accessible in
both construction types. As I have argued in Bayer (1996), exclusive and evaluative only,
previously known as “quantificational” vs. “scalar”, derive from the domain in which only is
merged and should therefore not be taken as primitives of a semantic theory.

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 253

is theoretical. The empirical argument is that in its crude form the judgment is
wrong. As soon as the accent on the head noun Mutter is strengthened, not only the
DP but also the FP is understood as being in the scope of jeder, exactly as in (32b).
Thus, the low reading of the FP cannot be excluded a priori. Of course, the wide-
scope interpretation of nur exists too and appears to be the more accessible one. If
so, what does this interpretive difference follow from? My proposal is that it follows
from a distinction that Fanselow (2002), Frey (2005) and Fanselow and Lenertová
(2011) have identified as FORMAL FRONTING (FF) versus FOCUS FRONTING or CONTRASTIVE
FRONTING (CF). FF takes the highest XP from the middle field (which in German may
be in TP but in all likelihood also in vP) and moves it to SpecFinP, an information-
structurally neutral position in the left periphery. Applied to (32a), this means that
the object DP has been scrambled before it was moved to its ultimate destination in
SpecFinP. Retaining the assumption that FP is part of the DP, the relevant structure
is shown in (33).

(33) [vP [DP nur seine Mutter] [vP jeder [DP nur seine Mutter] liebt]]

Given our assumption of a pre-vP functionally grounded scope position, it is but a

small step to (34). In (34), the DP nur seine Mutter is in a criterial position in which
its scope is fixed once and for all, as indicated by ✓.

(34) [PrtP [DP nur seine Mutter] [Prt’ PrtuFP ✓ [vP [DP nur seine Mutter] [vP jeder [DP nur
seine Mutter] liebt]]]]

At this point, the DP under discussion can move on to SpecFinP. According to

Fanselow, Frey and Lenertová, it is FF-style movement, i.e. essentially an
upwards copying of the upper position of vP in (35) in order to satisfy the V2-
constraint.

(35) [FinP [DP nur seine Mutter] [Fin’ liebt [PrtP [DP nur seine Mutter] [Prt’ PrtuFP ✓ [vP
[DP nur seine Mutter] [vP jeder [DP nur seine Mutter] liebt]]]]]]

PrtP is the relevant phrase in which the FP nur of the SMALL PARTICLE PHRASE
(SPrtP) nur seine Mutter values PrtuFP. PrtP is lower than SpecFinP but it is higher
than the quantifier jeder. This derives the prominent and unmarked interpreta-
tion of (32a), and it does so without the assumption that the FP is an adverb, let
alone an adverb which is adjoined to FinP (alias CP). In the same way as in the
previous section where we considered discourse particles ex-situ, the particle nur
in its function as an FP is not interpreted in its clause-initial position but rather in
a much lower position.

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254 Josef Bayer

The second observation was that, as a marked option, the FP may still have
access to a narrow scope interpretation in relation to the universal quantifier. An
important part of this observation was that in this case the fronted DP bears extra
heavy stress. Let me understand this as an indication of contrastive fronting (CF).
Unlike FF, which may start from a scrambled position, CF starts from vP or a
closely vP-related focus position. Assuming that the anti-focused quantifier jeder
is in a higher position, the relevant representation is as in (36).

(36) [FinP [DP nur seine Mutter] [Fin’ liebt [jeder [PrtP [DP nur seine Mutter] [Prt’ PrtuFP
✓ [vP [vP jeder [DP nur seine Mutter] liebt]]]]]]]

The checking station for nur remains exactly the same as in (36). The difference is
simply that jeder is in a slightly higher position due to the fact that the SPrtP nur
seine Mutter has not been scrambled across jeder. CF is a marked option.
Nevertheless it is a possibility. It gives rise to the reading according to which in
spite of its linear order nur is interpreted in the scope of jeder.
Essentially, the same point is made in Smeets and Wagner (2016). These
authors argue on the basis of Dutch and German examples for an analysis which
allows the FP to reconstruct below a quantifier or below an adverb. While Büring
and Hartmann (2001) propose a theory by which the FP is a one-place proposi-
tional operator that adjoins to VP or an extension of it but never to an argument,
Smeets and Wagner propose that the FP only “takes two syntactic arguments, a
constituent that corresponds to or at least contains its semantic focus (“Focus
Constituent”), and a second constituent (“Remnant Constituent”), whose denota-
tion has to compose with that of the first to form a proposition”. This is nothing
new, of course. No semantic account of FP can escape the distinction between
focus, the XP that the FP associates with, and scope, the domain which provides
the open proposition λx p(x) against which the truth value can be computed.
According to the present account as well as to Smeets and Wagner (2016), it is
natural that this elementary distinction is reflected in syntactic structure.
A related case in point is scope inversion which is associated with the typical
rise-fall contour that Büring (1997) calls “topic accent” (/) as followed by a “focus
accent” (\) as in /ALL that glitters is NOT\gold. Here, the quantifier is in the scope
of negation. The reading is “it is not the case that everything glittering is gold”.
As pointed out by Reis (2005: 478), scope inversion holds in constructions with
FP. Consider (37).

(37) /Nur FLEISCH aß NIE\mand NEG > ONLY

only meat ate no.one
‘For nobody it was true that he/she ate nothing but meat’

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 255

Büring and Hartmann (2001) refer to this example in their footnote 21 with the
comment that “even with this intonational pattern” they would “fail to get an
inverted reading”. According to my own intuitions, this is surprising because the
scope inversion interpretation which they deny here is quasi the only reading
that I can get. If my judgment is on the right track, however, nur in (37) cannot be
interpreted in its surface position, and the assumption of the SPrtP nur Fleisch
becomes unavoidable.

3.5 A glimpse at negation

With respect to negation in English, Sternefeld (2006) claims to have detected a

related problem by which surface constituency appears to be in disagreement with
semantic interpretation. His example is given in (38). The preferred relative scope
of the logical operators of negation, modality and quantification appears in (39).

(38) Not every boy can be above average height

(39) ¬ ( ◊ ( ∀x (x ∈ǁboyǁ ∧ x is above average height)))

From the LF in (39) it is inferred that not every boy cannot be a constituent, and
that in (38) not is in fact adjoined to IP as shown in (40).

(40) [IP not [IP [DP every boy]1 [I’ can [VP t1 be above average height]]]]

The PF by which not appears in the highest position is thought to be a direct

window into the semantic representation. The disturbing fact is, however,
that the syntax of negation in English is in disagreement with this proposal.
We get examples like Jim didn’t wash my car or Jim hadn’t heard anything
like that before but not *Not Jim washed/did wash my car or *Not Jim had
heard anything like that before. Examples like Not Jim but Tom washed my
car or Not Jim washed my car but Tom are special cases of so-called “term
negation” and seem to have relatively little to do with sentence negation.
Apart from this, not as a pre-IP propositional operator seems to be inexistent
in English. On the other hand, natural constituency suggests that not and
every boy ARE in fact part of one and the same DP [not every boy]. Thus,
there seems to be disagreement between the syntax and the semantics of
(38). How can this disagreement be resolved? The analysis that comes to
mind in the context of the theory developed so far is obvious. Assume that
there is an invariant and functionally determined representation of clausal

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256 Josef Bayer

negation in the sense of the head of a NegP. Next to NegP there is the
possibility of building smaller phrases which are likewise headed by Neg but
in which Neg cannot be interpreted as a clausal operator. Given that exam-
ples like (38) are specimens of sentence negation, not every boy, not all the
girls, not too many kids, not even half of the voters etc. appear to be small
NegPs which need to associate with a Neg-head that has propositional
scope. We can assume they are built in a separate workspace and are then
merged wherever they belong thematically in the VP of the sentence under
construction. From inside VP, the small NegP (let’s call it SNegP) not every
boy will raise to the specifier of clausal negation. Here it is in a typical spec-
head agreement configuration, and as a consequence its scope gets frozen.
Since the SNegP continues to be a DP that needs to check its nominative
Case, it will move on to SpecIP/SpecTP essentially pied-piping the sub-
constituent not along. If so, the scope position of not is not at all what we
see at the PF-side of the grammar. Its PF-appearance is rather a somewhat
misleading epiphenomenon of natural constituency and pied piping. My
tentative proposal for the syntactic derivation of (38) is outlined in (41).

(41)
IP

DP I’

I NegP

DP Neg’

Neg VPmod

Vmod ∀ VP

Not every boy ø not every boy ø can not every boy be above average height

QR is indicated by ∀ for concreteness, but this is not of interest here. What is of

interest is the scope of negation. The checking site of the Neg-head of the SNegP not
every boy is signaled by ✓. This is the freezing point of negation. Beyond this
freezing point, not is inactive. Movement to SpecIP clearly has nothing to do with

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 257

negation. We see that a complex phrase is “decomposed” in the course of the

derivation by moving to designated functional positions. The phrase moves to as
many functional positions as are necessary to satisfy its relevant features. This has
the consequence that what we ultimately see is not what we get. We get much more
than what meets the eye.
I am sure that many questions remain but a more thorough treatment would
fall outside the scope of this article. My goal was rather to indicate that my analysis
of particles, DiPs as well as FPs, may have relevance for domains of grammar that
are normally not associated with the grammar of particles.

3.6 WYSIWYG is wrong again

We started the section on focus particles with a sketch of the opposition

between the so-called “adverb camp” and the so-called “mixed camp”. What
I proposed here is totally incompatible with the assumptions of the former.
However, it is also only weakly compatible with the latter. The reason is that
I assume FPs as well as the negator to be functional heads throughout. FPs
as well as DiPs are cornerstones of the functional skeleton that builds clause
structure, along with T, C, Neg, Asp and other functional categories. The
theory is “mixed” only in the sense that not every occurrence of a particle is
necessarily in its scope position. Those occurrences in which it is not, fall
under the notion of “small particle phrase”. These phrases have a feature if
not more by which they must undergo movement to a valuation position. In
this way, the SPrtPs will pass through “big particle phrases” in which they
undergo agreement with the particle and value its corresponding feature.
This is the essence of a very simple story which, however, does justice to the
grammar of FPs and maybe also to the grammar of negation. WYSIWYG
theories turn out to be on the wrong track.

4 Toward a unified account

In the history of modern linguistics, FPs and DiPs have by and large been dealt with
as two completely separate phenomena and therefore also separate research topics.
A plausible reason is certainly that FPs occur virtually in all languages whereas DiPs
were only identified in German, Dutch and closely related languages. DiPs were
seen as a quirk of West-Germanic. This view has become untenable as more and
more languages were found in which closer inspection reveals the existence and the

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258 Josef Bayer

functioning of DiPs.29 With respect to German, the separation of DiPs and FPs was
always a conceptual problem because of the lexical overlap of the two domains; nur,
bloß, auch and various others participate in both domains. As Hentschel (1986) and
many others have shown, the current inventory of DiPs in German has developed
out of lexical categories which mostly continue to exist as such. If so, one is not
surprised to see DiPs developing out of FPs, and both DiPs and FPs sharing various
properties. The present study has identified some of them. The more remarkable
ones are that (i) both appear to be functional heads, (ii) both project next to “big”
PrtP also “small” PrtPs, (iii) both show in small PrtPs the phenomenon of emphatic
fronting, (iv) small PrtPs move to the specifier of a big PrtP in which their scope is
frozen even if movement to further checking sites may still be and in fact often is a
possibility but then for independent purposes, (v) both show the phenomenon of
particle doubling, albeit, as the contrast between Dutch and German shows, not in
the same frequency in each of these languages and (vi) both conform to the
architecture that Rizzi (1991/1996) has identified as the configuration of CRITERIAL
checking and freezing. This collection of common properties cannot be accidental.
It looks very much like the reflex of a unitary system. The irreducible differences
between DiPs and FPs are that (a) DiPs are clause type and illocution dependent
whereas FPs are by and large clause type and illocution independent30 and (b) FPs
create an operator/variable relation that is not found in DiPs.31 Another question is
why FPs occur in all languages and can mostly be translated easily whereas DiPs are
much less uniformly distributed and can often not be transferred from one language
into another as, for instance, Schubiger (1965) has shown for English and German.
Nevertheless, the convergence between DiPs and FPs that the present analysis has
revealed should be seen as a step in the right direction.

29 See various contributions in Bayer, Hinterhölzl and Trotzke. eds (2015), Bayer and
Struckmeier. eds. (2017), vol. 28 of The Linguistic Review, edited by Biberauer and Sheehan
and vol 68 of Studia Linguistica. There is also highly relevant work on Bangla in Dasgupta (1980,
1987, 2005); see also Bayer and Dasgupta (2016) on the Bangla DiP je that is homophonous with
one of the complementizers of the language.
30 Not completely though. While only/nur or also/auch are fine in imperatives, even/sogar are
not.
(i) Give me only/also/*even beer!
(ii) Gib mir nur/auch/*sogar Bier!

The pragmatic reason for this difference is obviously related to the fact that even/sogar impli-
cates that beer is the least likely substance that I desire, and that this leads to a Gricean clash
with the imperative, which is understood as “make it true that I have beer”. The conflict does not
emerge when also/auch is used because the “least likely” part is missing here.
31 For focus association of DiPs see, however, Egg and Mursell (2017).

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 Criterial Freezing in the syntax of particles 259

5 Conclusions
Attributing functional head status to particles, DiPs as well as FPs, opens an
avenue of research that puts these elements right into core syntax. Particles
occupy fixed functional positions in clause structure. These Prt positions have
been identified as criterial positions in analogy to criterial positions that are
familiar from the work of Rizzi (1991/1996) and Haegeman (1995). Particles can
alternatively be merged with smaller phrases such as DPs, PPs etc. The scope of
these Small Particle Phrases (SPrtP) is unfixed as long as the SPrtP is not in the
context of a clause structure that admits the particle as a semantically fully
interpretable element. The feature of the particle is active until the SPrtP has
reached a matching Criterial position. It is deactivated once SPrtP passes through
the specifier of a matching criterial head. The syntax of particles – DiPs as well as
FPs – echoes structures and processes that are familiar from more widely studied
domains of grammar, especially wh-movement. No construction-specific stipula-
tions have to be added. The differences between different types of SPrtPs follow
from the grammatical role that emphasis plays in SPrtP-internal fronting
operations.
Let me hasten to say that the theoretical interpretation of the facts we have
reached here corresponds closely to the claims that have been forwarded in
Bayer (1996). The difference between this approach and the current one resides
in technological differences between GB and Minimalism. In GB, SPrtPs were
forced to be QR-moved to a scope position. In Minimalism, they can be assumed
to raise to the specifier of a functional projection for feature valuation. Apart from
this, many of the insights and generalizations remain the same.

Acknowledgments: This research was supported by DFG grant BA 1178/9-1. The

quality of this chapter has greatly benefitted from written comments by the
editors, by Peter Culicover and by two anonymous reviewers. Thanks also to
Sjef Barbiers, Joachim Jacobs, Gereon Müller, Luigi Rizzi, Michael Rochemont,
Martin Salzmann, Yvonne Viesel and Michael Wagner. Remaining shortcomings
are in my own responsibility.

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