A Defective Auxiliary in Danish

Abstract

In English, auxiliaries form a cohesive category—unlike main verbs, they all raise to T. In Danish, it is not so obvious that auxiliaries form such a unified category. In root clauses, all verbal elements can raise to T (and then to C), while in embedded clauses they always stay in situ. Therefore, determining the position of a verbal element in the extended verbal projection is a challenging task. We examine the Danish verbal elementg⊘re‘do’ that shows up when the verb phrase has been topicalized, elided, or pronominalized. Even though on the surfaceg⊘remight appear to be of category T or v, we argue that it is located right in the middle. We argue that it is an auxiliary, but, unlike other auxiliaries,g⊘reis defective because it only subcategorizes for vPs that are pronominal.^*