HAVE CONTRACTION - EXPLAINING TRACE EFFECTS IN A THEORY WITHOUT MOVEMENT

The English auxiliary have may reduce to the nonsyllabic form /v/ in c ertain environments. This phenomenon (known as have contraction) has b een adopted by proponents of derivational approaches to syntax (e.g. R adford 1988: 414) as evidence for the existence of traces and of verb movement in general. However, closer examination of the data reveals t hat have contraction only occurs when three conditions apply. i. when the auxiliary is finite; ii. when it follows a pronoun with an empty c oda, iii. when that pronoun is the whole subject, that is, is not conj oined with any other noun or pronoun. It is not clear how the movement approach can account for conditions (ii) and (iii) above. My proposal is that the frequent occurrence of strings conforming to the above co nditions is such that over time the auxiliary verb has become an affix . The solution is offered within the framework of lexical-functional g rammar, a unification-based approach in which words and phrases are re presented at copresent parallel levels containing functional and categ orial information (S-structure and c-structure). The two individual-st ructures created by the pronoun and the affix are able to unify to cre ate the larger f-structure of an inflected pronoun. The affix v attach es to its pronominal host through morphological composition using insi de-out function application. In this way the affix is able to supply i nformation regarding TENSE and ASP to the whole sentence. This is bloc ked if the inflected pronoun is part of a conjoined subject, explainin g the ungrammaticality of sentences with conjoined NP subjects, one of which is an inflected pronoun This behavior would not be predicted by theories that assume that have contraction is a purely surface (phras e-structure) phonetic phenomenon.