Nominal and Verbal Behavior in Pulaar Infinitives

Abstract

This study explores the nominal and verbal behavior of infinitive clauses in the Futa Tooro dialect of Pulaar. Pulaar infinitives have the distribution of nouns, in that they can appear in both the subject and object position of verbs and can be possessed by possessive constructions. These infinitives also vary in that sometimes they behave as full nominals that select for adjectival modifiers, and sometimes behave partially verbally, selecting for adverbial modifiers. As noted by Ba (2017), it appears that this variation correlates to whether the infinitive takes a determiner that agrees with the infinitive head in noun class. When there is a determiner agreeing with the infinitive head in noun class, the infinitive behaves fully nominally, however when this determiner is not present, the infinitive behaves partially verbally. Using the ideas laid out by Kratzer (1994) and expanded upon by Harley (2009), we show that this variance in nominal and verbal behavior can be explained by which point in the derivation the nominalizing infinitive head attaches. Harley identifies the verbalizing v^o head to be inside of the agent introducing vP layer. If the infinitive head attaches below vP, the infinitive is never verbal at any point in the derivation and behaves fully nominally. If the infinitive head attaches above vP, however, the infinitive behaves partially verbally, as it is a verb at some point in the derivation.