Festschrifts

This paper examines inflection on fronted verbs in Danish. In both VP topicalization and VP left dislocation with resumption, the inflection on the fronted verb is governed by an in situ auxiliary, suggesting that the fronted VP originates as a sister to that auxiliary. This analysis is straightforward for VP topicalization, but fails for VP left dislocation. Yet, the two show identical patterns of inflection, down to systematic covariance in case of interspeaker variation. I take this as evidence that the two fronting constructions have the same syntax and vary only in whether the proform that mediates between the auxiliary and the fronted VP is overt or null. That in turn implies that verbal inflection can be governed at a distance, and that some mechanism other than the standard generative ones (affix-hopping, selection, and feature valuing) is involved.