On Tense, agreement, and the syntax of null and overt subjects Evidence from Romance infinitives

In this paper I argue that the position and realization of subjects in adverbial non-finite clauses in Italian, Spanish, Galician, and European Portuguese can provide valuable insight into the licensing conditions for pro and postverbal subjects in finite clauses in these pro-drop languages. I first...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Isogloss Vol. 10; no. 7; pp. 1 - 18
Main Author: Fernández-Salgueiro, Gerardo
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Bellaterra Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Servei de Publicacions 01.01.2024
Subjects:
Adverbials
Agreements
Clauses
Covert
Functional heads
Galician language
Grammatical agreement
Grammatical subject
Infinitives
Italian language
Languages
Licensing
Phi features
Portuguese language
Pro drop parameter
Romance languages
Spanish language
Syntactic analysis
Syntactic movement
Syntax
Tense
Verbs
ISSN:2385-4138, 2385-4138
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:In this paper I argue that the position and realization of subjects in adverbial non-finite clauses in Italian, Spanish, Galician, and European Portuguese can provide valuable insight into the licensing conditions for pro and postverbal subjects in finite clauses in these pro-drop languages. I first provide evidence that Tense and Agreement constitute separate syntactic heads in these languages, as argued by Belletti (1990) among others, and also apply this analysis to non-finite clauses in Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese. I will also argue, after analyzing the syntactic variation exhibited by subjects in non-finite clauses (containing regular and inflected infinitives) in Spanish, Galician, and European Portuguese, that (i) postverbal overt subject DPs are licensed by a full set of φ-features in Agr (overt or covert), (ii) pro is licensed by an Agr head that is overtly realized by either overt φ-features or verb movement, and (iii) preverbal overt subject DPs are licensed by verb movement to Agr.
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ISSN:2385-4138
2385-4138
DOI:10.5565/rev/isogloss.416