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In:Non-canonical Control in a Cross-linguistic Perspective
Edited by Anne Mucha, Jutta M. Hartmann and Beata Trawiński
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 270] 2021
► pp. 35–82

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Alleged obligatorily controlled inflected infinitives

 | CEHUM, University of Minho
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 17 September 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.270.02bar
Abstract
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)
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Santos, Ana Lúcia & Anabela Gonçalves
2025. Object control verbs and syntactic causatives: Inflected infinitives as a cue to syntactic structure. Journal of Linguistics ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Landau, Idan
2024. Noncanonical Obligatory Control. Language and Linguistics Compass 18:3 DOI logo

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