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

I' can. Otherwise, Sardinian would allow 'if'-infinitives. Or would it not? Let us consider the
possibility that a head governs its specifier.
Kayne seems to emphasize the idea that V-adjoined-to-I' plays the role of blocking
government by C o by minimality; so, Kayne could argue, I o , even if able to govern its specifier
PRO when filled by V o , would not block government by C o . But notice that the government
requirement in the definition of Binding Domain (as in 0) is not a requirement of exclusive
government: if I o governs PRO in its specifier, that is sufficient for IP to become a potential
Binding Domain (and an actual one for PRO as pronominal). So, to the extent we allow a head to
govern its specifier, and we assume that functional head containing V o is a governor, then it is
immaterial whether C o governs PRO or not whenever PRO is governed by I o containing V. So
Sardinian, for which Kayne assumes V raises to the functional head whose specifier contains
PRO, would be predicted to allow 'if'-infinitives, contrary to fact.
An option for solving this problem could be that heads do not govern specifiers, so that
adjunction to I' is the only means for V to govern PRO from inside IP.
But this is not easily tenable either. Consider again Chomsky's original proposal. If heads
do not govern specifiers, we would have to assume that in a case like:
(20) They like [ NP their books ]
the genitive pronoun (their) has to be governed by a head adjoined to N' (or D' if we adopt the
DP hypothesis) in order to prevent the verb (like) from governing the genitive and enlarging the
Binding Domain to the whole clause. Put in general terms, Kayne's proposal, although designed
to account only for the PRO distribution, leads to the conclusion that any case of non-
complementary distribution of pronominals and anaphors involves X o adjunction to Y'.
If we go further into the consequences of this proposal, even more basic problems
appear. Consider a structure like:
1