UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 14 (2002)
A morphological approach to the absence
of expletive PRO
PETER ACKEMA
Whereas finite clauses can have impersonal readings, this
possibility appears to be universally excluded for clauses headed by an
infinitive. In other words, the understood subject of an infinitival clause
must always be interpreted as an argument and can never be expletive. In this
paper it is argued that this distinction between the two types of clause is
ultimately caused by a
purely morphological factor, namely whether or not the inflection
on the verb that heads the clause is part of a paradigm or not. The analysis is
based on the hypothesis that inflection can function as the subject argument of
the verb. The account of the properties of infinitival clauses is extended to a
particular class of languages in which the inflection on finite verbs is not
part of a paradigm either.
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