Alleged obligatorily controlled inflected infinitives
This paper examines the arguments presented in
Modesto (2009, 2018) and Sheehan (2013, 2018) in favor of the idea that inflected
infinitival complements of desideratives, commissives, and object
control verbs such as persuadir ‘persuade’ in
Portuguese can be obligatorily controlled. It argues that the
relevant complements are not instances of obligatory control (OC);
they rather contain pro, interpreted by the same
operations that govern its interpretation in finite clauses. This
conclusion reinforces Landau’s
(2015) claim that the presence of agreement inflection
blocks control in attitude complements. Focusing on European
Portuguese, the paper argues that this conclusion allows for a
precise characterization of the distribution of the inflected
infinitive in verbal complement position: the inflected infinitive
is barred in the complement position of restructuring verbs and in
interrogative complements. The paper offers an account of this
distribution that is based on the idea that inflected infinitives
are bare TP projections. Evidence in favor of this claim comes from
an examination of the distribution of pre-verbal subjects. The
restrictions on subject reference found in inflected infinitival
complements of different OC attitude verbs in European Portuguese
stem from the particular status of Actional complements in OC
contexts (Farkas 1992;
Jackendoff & Culicover
2003).
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Arguments that inflected infinitival complements of OC attitude
verbs in EP are not obligatorily controlled
- 2.1Split antecedents
- 2.2Long-distance dependencies
- 2.3Other tests for OC
- 2.4Binding versus coreference
- 2.5Conclusions
- 3.Implications for the syntax of inflected infinitives
- 4.Inflected infinitives lack C(=Force)
- 5.Why are these inflected infinitival complements semantically
constrained?
- 6.A note on Brazilian Portuguese (Modesto 2009, 2018)
- 7.Conclusions
-
Notes
-
References
References (64)
References
Alexiadou, Artemis & Anagnostopoulou, Elena. 1998. Parameterizing
AGR: Word order, V-movement and
EPP-checking. Natural
Language and Linguistic
Theory 16: 491–539.
Âmbar, Manuela. 1988. Para
uma sintaxe da inversão sujeito verbo em
portugues. Lisboa: University of Lisbon dissertation.
Âmbar, Manuela. 1994. ‘Aux-to-Comp’
and lexical restrictions on verb
movement. In Paths
towards Universal Grammar, Luigi Rizzi, Jan Koster, Jean-Yves Pollock & Roberto Zanuttini (eds), 1–24. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.
Barbosa, Pilar. 1995. Null
Subjects. PhD
dissertation, MIT.
Barbosa, Pilar. 2000. Clitics:
A window into the null subject
property. In Essays
in Portuguese Comparative
Syntax, João Costa (ed.), 31–93. Oxford: OUP.
Barbosa, Pilar. 2001. On
inversion in wh-questions in
Romance. In Romance
Inversion, Aafke Hulk & Jean-Yves Pollock (eds), 20–90. Oxford: OUP.
Barbosa, Pilar. 2009. Two
kinds of subject pro. Studia
Linguistica 63(1): 2–58.
Barbosa, Pilar. 2019. pro
as a minimal nP: Toward a unified approach to
pro-drop. Linguistic
Inquiry 50(3): 487–526.
Barbosa, Pilar & De Cat, Cecile. 2019. Intervention
effects in wh-chains: The combined effect of syntax and
processing. Glossa: A Journal
of General
Linguistics 4(1): 127.
Barbosa, Pilar, Duarte, Eugénia & Kato, Mary. 2005. Null
subjects in European and Brazilian
Portuguese. Journal of
Portuguese
Linguistics 4: 11–52.
Boskovič, Zelko. 1996. Selection
and the categorial status of infinitival
complements. Natural Language
and Linguistic
Theory 14: 269–304.
Chomsky, Noam. 1977. On
wh-movement. In Formal
Syntax, Peter Culicover, Thom Wasow & Adrian Akmajian (eds), 71–132. New York NY: Academic Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Barriers. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Cinque, Gugliermo. 2006. Restructuring
and Functional
Heads. Oxford: OUP.
Cunha, Luís & Purificafição, Silvano. 2008. Algumas
evidências de temporalidade no infinitivo
simples. In Textos
Seleccionados. XXIII Encontro Nacional da Associação
Portuguesa de Linguística, Sónia Frota & Ana Lúcia Santos (eds), 179–191. Lisboa: APL.
De Cat, Cécile. 2005. French
subject clitics are not agreement
markers. Lingua 108: 1195–1219.
Demirdache, Hamida. 1992. Resumptive
Chains and Restrictive Relative Clauses, Appositives and
Dislocation Structures. PhD
dissertation, MIT.
Duarte, Inês. 1987. A
construção de topicalizaçãona grammatica do português:
Regência, ligação e condições sobre movimento, dissertação
de
doutoramento, Universidade de Lisboa.
Duarte, Inês. 2018. Comments
on complementation in
Portuguese. In Complement
Clauses in Portuguese: Syntax and
Acquisition [Issues in Hispanic and
Lusophone Linguistics 17], Ana Lúcia Santos & Anabela Gonçalves (eds), 243–262. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Farkas, Donka. 1992. On
obviation. In Lexical
Matters, Anna Szabolcsi & Ivan Sag (eds), 85–109. Stanford CA: CSLI.
Ferreira, Marcelo. 2000. Argumentos
nulos em português
brasileiro. MA
thesis, Unicamp, Campinas.
Ginzburg, Jonathan & Sag, Ivan. 2001. Interrogative
Investigations. Stanford CA: CSLI.
Gonçalves, Madalena, Ana Lúcia Santos & Inês Duarte. 2014. (Pseudo-)Inflected
infinitives and Control as
Agree. In Romance
Languages and Linguistic Theory 2012. Selected papers from
‘Going Romance’ Leuven 2012 [Romance
Languages and Linguistic Theory
6], Karen Lahousse & Stefania Marzo (eds), 161–180. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Grano, Thomas. 2015. Control
and
Restructuring. Oxford: OUP.
Holmberg, Anders. 2005. Is
there a little pro? Evidence from
Finnish. Linguistic
Inquiry 36: 533–564.
Hornstein, Norbert. 1999. Movement
and control. Linguistic
Inquiry 30: 69–96.
Jackendoff, Ray & Culicover, Peter. 2003. The
semantic basis of control in
English. Language 79(3): 517–556.
Kato, Mary. 1999. Strong
pronouns, weak pronominals and the null subject
parameter. Probus 11: 1–37.
Kiparsky, Paul & Kiparsky, Carol. 1971. Fact. In Semantics:
An Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics and
Psychology, Danny D. Steinberg & Leon A. Jakobovits (eds), 345–369. Cambridge: CUP.
Laca, Brenda. 2015. On
the temporal orientation of intensional subjunctives in
spanish. In Sentence
and Discourse, Jacqueline Guéron (ed.), 23–44. Oxford: OUP.
Landau, Idan. 2000. Elements
of
Control. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Landau, Idan (2004) The Scale of Finiteness and the Calculus of Control, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 22, 811–877.
Landau, Idan. 2015. A
Two-tiered Theory of
Control. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Madeira, Ana. 1994. On
the Portuguese inflected
infinitive. In UCL
Working Papers in
Linguistics, Vol. 6, John Harris (ed.), 179–203. London: University College London.
Manzini, Rita & Savoia, Leonardo M. 2002. Clitics.
Lexicalization patterns of the so-called 3rd person
dative. Catalan Journal of
Linguistics 1: 117–155.
Martins, Ana Maria. 1994. Clíticos
na história do
português. PhD
dissertation, University of Lisbon.
McCloskey, James. 1996. On
the scope of verb movement in
Irish. Natural Language and
Linguistic
Theory 14: 47–104.
Modesto, Marcello. 2000. Null
subjects without rich
agreement. In Brazilian
Portuguese and the Null Subject
Parameter, Mary Kato & Esmeralda Negrão (eds), 147–174. Madrid: Iberoamericana.
Modesto, Marcello. 2007. Null
subjects in Brazilian Portuguese and Finnish: They are not
derived by
movement. In New
Horizons in the Analysis of Control and
Raising, William D. Davies & Stanley Dubinsky (eds), 231–248. Dordrecht: Springer.
Modesto, Marcello. 2008. Topic
prominence and null
subjects. In The
Limits of Syntactic
Variation [Linguistik
Aktuell/Linguistics Today
132], Theresa Biberauer (ed.), 375–409. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Modesto, Marcello. 2009. What
Brazilian Portuguese says about control: Remarks on Boeckx
and
Hornstein. Syntax 13(1): 78–96.
Nunes, Jairo. 2019. Remarks
on finite control and hyper-raising in Brazilian
Portuguese. Journal of
Portuguese
Linguistics 18(1): 4.
Ordónez, Francisco & Treviño, Esthela. 1999. Left-dislocated
subjects and the pro-drop parameter: A case study of
Spanish. Lingua 107: 39–68.
Platzack, Christer. 2004. Agreement
and the person phrase
hypothesis. In Working
Papers in Scandinavian
Syntax 73: 83–112.
Pollard, Carl & Sag, Ivan. 1994. Head-driven
Phrase Structure. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Pollock, Jean-Yves. 1997. Langage
et cognition: Introduction au programme minimaliste de la
grammaire
générative. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Portner, Paul. 1997. The
semantics of mood, complementation, and conversational
force. Natural Language
Semantics 8: 167–212.
Raposo, Eduardo. 1987. Case
Theory and Infl-to-Comp: The inflected infinitive in
European
Portuguese. Linguistic
Inquiry 18: 85–109.
Raposo, Eduardo. 1994. Affective
operators and clause structure in European Portuguese and
European Spanish. Ms, University of California Santa Barbara.
Raposo, Eduardo. 1996. Towards
an unification of topic
constructions. Ms, University of California at Santa Barbara.
Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The
fine structure of the left
periphery. In Elements
of Grammar: A Handbook of Generative
Syntax, Liliane Haegeman (ed.), 282–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Rodrigues, Cilene. 2004. Impoverished
Morphology and A-movement out of
Case-domains. PhD
dissertation, University of Maryland.
Sag, Ivan & Pollard, Carl. 1991. An
integrated theory of complement
control. Language 67: 63–113.
Sheehan, Michelle. 2013. Portuguese,
Russian and the theory of
control. In Proceedings
of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Northeast Linguistics
Society, Hsin-Lun Huang, Ethan Poole & Amanda Rysling (eds), 115–126. Amherst MA: GLSA.
Sitaridou, Ioanna. 2002. The
Synchrony and Diachrony of Romance Infinitives with
Nominative Subjects. PhD
dissertation, University of Manchester.
Suñer, Margarita. 1986. On
the referential properties of embedded finite clause
subjects. In Generative
Studies in Spanish Syntax, Ivonne Bordelois, Heles Contreras & Karen Zagona (eds), 183–196. Dordrecht: Foris.
Vallduví, Enric. 1992. A
preverbal landing site for quantificational
operators. Catalan Working
Papers in
Linguistics 2: 319–344.
Wurmbrand, Susi. 2003. Infinitives:
Restructuring and Clause
Structure. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Landau, Idan
2024.
Noncanonical Obligatory Control.
Language and Linguistics Compass 18:3
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.