Jaume Solà i Pujols - Departament de Filologia Catalana ...

auxiliary Chain will plausibly govern the head of the participle Chain, since it is reasonable that
auxiliaries subcategorize for the participial form they are constructed with. So the link between
the two sub-Chains is government and this might be a necessary condition for Government-
Chain extension. What are sufficient conditions is not clear, but intuitively auxiliaries and
participles are closely related entities and it looks reasonable that they share some index of some
sort.
In Catalan and Spanish, participles are most likely incorporated to auxiliaries (see Llinàs
(1988)), so that, on the one hand, Government-Chain extension is not needed for these languages
(as far as auxiliary-participle constructions with incorporation are concerned), and, on the other,
this incorporation is suggestive of the close relation we claim is between auxiliaries and
participles.
It is perhaps significative that the cases where Chain extension is required in Italian
involve agreement with the I-subject in both the auxiliary and the participle:
(56) Erano ... venutij [ VP tj i bambini ]
Be-3rd-pl come-msc-pl the children(3-pl-msc)
Perhaps this situation makes Chain extension easier, in that the heads of the two sub-
Chains agree and so share some index. Or the other way around, perhaps this agreement is a
manifestation of Chain extension. Remember that in the present account, there is no A-
movement from the basic position occupied by i bambini to the Spec of the upper AGR (where
the auxiliary stands), so that the Agreement morphology in the participle cannot be triggered by
some intermediate subject trace in the specifier of the participial FC. On the other hand, in
Catalan and Spanish this agreement pattern has entirely disappeared: the reason would be that
since in these languages the participle incorporates into the auxiliary, Chain extension is not
required.
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