The Morphosyntactic Correlates of Finiteness

In this paper I question the traditional view of the notion finiteness. Rather than being a morphosyntactic feature, I argue that if anything it is a semantic category related to time, reference and definiteness. Furthermore I attempt to abandon the rather misleading labels of “finite” and “non-finite” verb forms by offering evidence from English, Romance and Japanese which reveal that verb forms may have morphological tense despite having no independent time reference. I propose a realisational theory of morphology in the spirit of Anderson (1992) and Stump (forthcoming) in which the shapes of verb forms are the expression of particular configurations of features at f-structure involving tense, aspect, modality and subordination. For example I show that to-infinitives like subjunctives and modal verbs are prototypical expressions of irrealis modality while a tensed form in an Italian perception verb complement may be used to unambiguously express imperfective aspect.