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

Chapter 4
Infinitival Constructions
In the preceding chapter we have developed a theory on how AGR determines what is
the I-subject in a clause, in order to derive Burzio's Generalization and explain the contrast
between NSLs and non-NSLs w.r.t. subject inversion. We claimed that AGR morphology plays a
central role in determining a good deal of cross-linguistic contrasts.
If this is correct, then our account of infinitival clauses cannot be a trivial extension of
our theory for finite clauses, for non-finite clauses have the central property, in many languages,
of not showing any AGR morphology. So, two possibilities come to mind: either non-finite
clauses have a radically different behavior w.r.t. the phenomena discussed in the previous
chapter, or morphology is not so crucial as we claimed in accounting for those phenomena.
Our proposal will be that neither situation is exactly true:
although non-finite clauses have more restricted possibilities, they are in many essential respects
similar to finite clauses, because, on the one hand, they have alternative means of recovering
AGR content apart from morphology and, on the other hand, they are subject to some
parallelism principles w.r.t. the finite clauses in the same language. In other words, the speaker
recovers the lack of information in non-finite clauses from both UG and some parametric options
fixed on the basis of finite clauses, ultimately, from the richness of AGR in finite clauses.
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