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Article published In: Linguistic Variation
Vol. 25:1 (2025) ► pp.123–167

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Microvariation in verbal rather

ORCiD logo with link | Yale University
Published online: 25 March 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.22026.woo
Abstract
This paper uses survey results to analyze patterns of judgments across different versions of the non-standard verbal use of the word rather, which can take participial morphology, as in rathered. Across numerous possible instantiations of the construction, there appear to be in fact a quite limited number of grammars, which are generated by an implicational hierarchy of functional heads, along with the availability of a silent verb have. The overall picture supports several broader conclusions. First, bare-infinitive–selecting verbs are nearly “closed class” because they have special syntactic properties that go beyond semantic or even syntactic selection: they must value the temporal verbal features of the embedded verb, or else provide a structural context for such valuation. Second, silent verbs can be licensed by head-moving to a modal head in the extended projection. This movement is freely available, but silence demands recoverability, which limits its application only to certain verbs, and certain uses/meanings of those verbs. Third, in addition to previously known configurations for building parasitic participle constructions, movement of a lower verb to a higher verb can extend the phase of the lower verb and lead to its silence. Fourth, the distribution of rather suggests that volitional meaning is not a primitive, but is constructed from smaller primitives. Finally, microvariation reveals a tight connection among logically distinct functional heads, suggesting that they are not acquired independently of each other, but interact in significant ways.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Overview
    • 2.1Licensing of silent verbs
    • 2.2Nearly closed class kind of verb in the first place
    • 2.3Parasitic participles
    • 2.4Restricted distribution
    • 2.5Microvariation
  • 3.The structure of verbal rather
    • 3.1Wood (2013)
    • 3.2The present study
  • 4.Microvariation and the parameter space
    • 4.1Modvolition[+Inf] → Modvolition[+Asp]
    • 4.2Modvolition[+Asp] → Modvolition[+have]
    • 4.3If you have one have, you have all the haves
    • 4.4Accounting for one-way correlations in judgments
  • 5.Further microvariation
    • 5.1A note on sooner
    • 5.2Adjunction to Modvolition
    • 5.3What kind of “have”?
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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