Movement and Identification of the Empty Subject in Infinitives
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概要
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In this paper, we will mainly discuss the identification of the subject of control infinitives, namely, 'PRO.' In addition, we will discuss another empty subject, 'trace' in raising infinitives, compared with 'PRO.' Though these two types of empty subjects have been distinguished from each other since the early days of generative grammar, the mechanism which differentiates them has not been clearly understood. We propose an analysis in which the properties of T, namely, the tense feature and the Φ-features, are responsible for the difference between control constructions and raising constructions: in the former, the movement of T is involved, which is the most economical derivation, while in the latter, the movement of DP is required in addition to the movement of T. What plays an important role in our analysis is the data of VP-ellipsis. We first show the correlation between the possibility of VP-ellipsis and the interpretation of PRO. Then we argue, based on the licensing condition on ellipsis presented by Lobeck (1995), that PRO is identified by the Φ-features' specification through T, which is crucially dependent on the movement of the nonfinite T. Second, we show that our analysis correctly predicts that VP-ellipsis fails in infinitival relatives and infinitival interrogatives, which can be accounted for by Subjacency, which, consequently, supports our movement analysis.
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